Routledge Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience

Understanding the visitor experience provides essential insights into how museums can affect people’s lives. Personal drives, group identity, decision-making and meaning-making strategies, memory, and leisure preferences, all enter into the visitor experience, which extends far beyond the walls of the institution both in time and space. Drawing upon a career in studying museum visitors, renowned researcher John Falk attempts to create a predictive model of visitor experience, one that can help museum professionals better meet those visitors’ needs. He identifies five key types of visitors who attend museums and then defines the internal processes that drive them there over and over again. Through an understanding of how museums shape and reflect their personal and group identity, Falk is able to show not only how museums can increase their attendance and revenue, but also their meaningfulness to their constituents. Review "Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience is a call to action; Falk's new book is inspiring. After closing the back cover, as a visitor researcher, I wanted to immediately locate the instrument, get out on the museum floor, and try it out with visitors. ... Real-life, real-time applicability is what I believe sets this model apart. It becomes a usable tool in the museum professional's toolkit with a focus on fluid predictability, not segmentation.... In addition to presenting a typology of visitor needs, Identity is a mantra for visitor-centered understanding and practice in museums. In fact, his model can be seen as a vehicle by which to re-examine the public value of museums." -Kathleen Tinworth (Denver Museum of Nature & Science), Museum Anthropology "Falk (Oregon State), a researcher in the field of museum functions, chooses an important time to present a model to enhance the effectiveness of all kinds of museums. The world economic scene is rather grim and traditional sources of support unreliable. He offers a work in progress, a theoretical model (the Museum Visitor Experience Model), to help visualize the relationships between museum and visitor, emphasizing the types of experience, not visitors. He believes these experiences should 'extend, confirm, and reinforce the visitor's existing beliefs, ' rather than communicate new information. These arguments present a major challenge for museums in the 21st century. Recommended." --CHOICE John Falk's determined focus on the visitor's experience continues to transform our understanding of the relationship between museums and their audiences. Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience demonstrates that Falk remains the leading voice in the field of museum learning. For the first time he moves beyond theory and proposes a model that museums can use to explore how to serve their visitors in more meaningful ways. -Nannette V. Maciejunes, Columbus Museum of Art John Falk's most exciting work reframes frustrating old questions in new ways that bring immediate clarity. In this important book, Falk shifts the old issue of visitor segmentation away from stable traits to ephemeral dispositions. His new formulation shows us visitors who actually seem to belong to the same species as ourselves, and whose differences relate to understandable differences in the ways that they perceive and use exhibitions. -Jay Rounds, E. Desmond Lee Professor of Museum Studies, University of Missouri St. Louis, and former editor of the Exhibitionist Journal This book should be read by anyone serious about visitor experiences in museums. Falk reconceptualises the field from a wholistic perspective using the 'lens' of visitor identity and motivation. The model he proposes will shape and inform the nature, design and understanding of visitor experiences in free-choice learning environments. -Roy Ballantyne, University of Queensland, and editor of Visitor Studies Journal From the Back Cover Drawing upon a career in studying museum visit