A Golden Age for Historic Properties
"Historic properties are on the verge of a golden age. Over the next two decades Americans will turn to historic houses and sites as a source of learning, enjoyment, and fulfillment."As someone who visits, thinks about and listens to ideas about museums all the time, I found this article to be both confirming and inspiring.
The Durels quickly warn that a golden age will only occur if we abandon the thinking of the 1980's. They prescribe we must:
- Stop thinking of visitors and start thinking of members
- Stop thinking of them and start thinking of us
- Stop thinking of interpretation and start thinking of facilitation
- Stop focusing only on the intellectual and social context of the experience, and start including spiritual content
The whole premise to the article is that the cultural tourism model is outdated and, when it does work, requires enough people to pay enough money for an organization's products or services for the institution to become sustainable. Museums are better off encouraging loyal customers whom they see often to visit often rather than hope for large numbers of customers to visit whom they will see only once.
The rest of the article suggests several new business models for institutions to consider.
They begin with a focus on the retiring boomer with excess time and money--and an intense desire to pursue their interests. Can a site become both the venue and the organization for like-minded individuals to pursue their common interests?
The Durels suggest trying to attract affinity groups and leaving the content and the experience up to the user. In the future, staff will become coordinators and facilitators rather than experts or doers.
This is hard for someone who has been counseling grant applicants for years to admit, but the Durels suggest that the museum visitor may not always be on a quest to learn and instead may simply go to just be there. Such experiences are spiritual and not intellectual. Museums and historic sites offer beauty, spirituality and a welcoming respite from a busy world and should try to capitalize on these assets.
The Durels suggest new measurements of success: replace visitation statistics with the number of members, affinity groups and volunteers.
The article ends with optimism that even with the economic downturn we are all facing, since the underlying problems are structural and do not reflect on the inherent value of historic sites, that organizations will thrive over the next twenty years if they simply respond to changing external realities.
Read A Golden Age for Historic Properties online.
Durel, John and Anita Nowery Durel. "A Golden Age for Historic Properties." AASLH History News 62, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 7-16.
Article courtesy of AASLH.
What Are People Saying About This Post?
This article is brilliant and inspiring. The museum community must work on accomplishing these goals across the board NOW, and not wait until it's too late. Let's be AHEAD of the curve for once.
Not brilliant and in several particulars disturbingly fundamentalist and self-aggrandizing. If this is really "the way" there ought to be a workshop or sesssion HERE in CT - where assumptions and merits are discussed and at least one skeptic be allowed to speak. I am prepared to show evidence that I stuck my neck out about as far is it can be to assert some elements of this manifesto that I agree with. But there's enough else that bothers me, it makes me really uncomfortable to think anyone could read this, take a big sigh of relief and imagine, "finally, THE WAY."