Short description:

The Engaging Museum is a practical guide book for museums and students on museum studies courses on how to create the highest quality experience for museum visitors.

Long description:

This very practical book guides museums on how to create the highest quality experience possible for their visitors. Creating an environment that supports visitor engagement with collections means examining every stage of the visit, from the initial impetus to go to a particular institution, to front-of-house management, interpretive approach and qualitative analysis afterwards.

This holistic approach will be immensely helpful to museums in meeting the needs and expectations of visitors and building their audience. 

This book features:

• includes chapter introductions and discussion sections


• supporting case studies to show how ideas are put into practice


• a lavish selection of tables, figures and plates to support and illustrate the discussion


• boxes showing ideas, models and planning suggestions to guide development


•  an up-to-date bibliography of landmark research.

The Engaging Museum offers a set of principles that can be adapted to any museum in any location and will be a valuable resource for institutions of every shape and size, as well as a vital addition to the reading lists of museum studies students.

"This is a well-researched, detailed book that presents much food for thought for museum managers and staff."

-Collection Management,vol.30, no 4

"...one of the greatest strengths of this book is the format itself. The text is supported with a range of boxes and other illustrative forms that serve to emphasise and break down key points: indeed a useful addition to a book that attempts to cover such a variety of themes...This book serves as a reader-friendly reference and is a very useful tool for museum and heritage professionals as well as students in relevant fields of study." - Dr Georgios Alexopoulos, University of York

Table of Contents:

Preface, Graham Black; Chapter 102 Introduction, Graham Black; Part 01 Museum audiences: their nature, needs and expectations, Graham Black; Chapter 1 ?Traditional? museum audiences: a quantitative and qualitative analysis, Graham Black; Chapter 2 Developing new audiences, Graham Black; Part 02 Operating for quality, Graham Black; Chapter 3 Stimulating the visit, Graham Black; Chapter 4 Visitor services: operating for quality, Graham Black; Part 03 Learning in museums, Graham Black; Chapter 5 Museums and lifelong learning, Graham Black; Chapter 6 Use of museums by schools, Graham Black; Part 04 Planned to engage, Graham Black; Chapter 7 Applying the principles of interpretation to museum display, Graham Black; Chapter 8 Interpretive master planning, Graham Black; Chapter 9 Concept development for museum galleries, Graham Black; Chapter 10 The engaging museum, Graham Black;