Academic literature on the topic 'Heritage and museums'

This paper focuses on how a single installation can enhance personalization of the information in cultural heritage museums and enhance the overall experience using interactive digital storytelling and the ability to touch artefacts. Interaction design methods helped establish best practices centring on usability. In the process low- fidelity and mid-fidelity prototypes were created based on the field studies such as obeservations in exhibits and interviewing professionals in different museums. The conclusion could be made that artefact and the purpose of the exhibit as an whole does get more intense if one has the opportunity to touch and make it part of the visitors journey can be said.

This thesis examines the motivation of volunteers through a study of front-of-house volunteers in museums and heritage visitor attractions in the UK. The heritage sector proved an appropriate population for the study sample due to the wide involvement of volunteers. A review of the literature found that research on volunteering had developed along two paradigms: the economic model, which views volunteers as unpaid workers; and the leisure model, which considers volunteering as a leisure activity. Within the heritage sector, the economic model was found to dominate. The study adopted a case study methodology in order to investigate the contexts within which volunteers are motivated. However, a major consideration of the research was to maximise the external validity of the study and 222 volunteers were interviewed across ten case studies. The findings of this thesis show that volunteers consider their activity to be a leisure activity, although this does not conflict with the introduction of professional volunteer management procedures. Volunteer motivation was found to change with length of service. Initially volunteers were motivated by intrinsic motives, in particular subject interest, while extrinsic motives, particularly social opportunities motivated them to continue to volunteer. An Interaction Model of Volunteer Motivation was proposed as a means of understanding and identifying the role of social opportunities in motivating volunteers. In addition, volunteers within the heritage sector are typically older, retired individuals and the act of retirement was found to have a significant impact on their decision to volunteer. The significance volunteers attributed to their encounters with visitors reinforced the importance of social interaction in motivating front-of-house volunteers. Three models of encounters were proposed: the service encounter, the host-guest encounter and peer tutoring. The volunteer-visitor encounter was found to be a hybrid of the three models,with volunteers gammg enjoyable social interaction and visitors learning from the encounter.

This study examines the role of the curator in the interpretation of history in museums and heritage attractions. The research uses data from twelve case studies collected from observation and interviews to examine the decision-making processes undertaken by curators in devising exhibitions and displays. The study examines the different interpretative opportunities available to the curator in determining their construction of history, in the selection of artefacts and the choice of historical interpretative approaches and interpretative techniques. The study demonstrates that the curator has to mediate his or her interpretative choices with a number of constraints. These constraints include the availability of artefacts, finance, the market, institutional structure and the ethics of the museum profession. In examining this decision-making process, the study argues that the construction of history in museums and heritage attractions represents a microcosm of the wider processes involved in the cultural construction of history. The study examines the role of history in society in upholding current beliefs and practices. Museums, as cultural institutions concerned with the past, are on the forefront of presenting society with its selective tradition, and as such are symbols of present values and attitudes. Curators, by virtue of their institutional role, are part of this wider cultural dynamic. Therefore their constructions of history in exhibitions, remain firmly within the current sociopolitical boundary, even though those constructions may also act to test and extend that same boundary.

Cultural and heritage tourism, one of the fastest growing segments of the tourism industry, is becoming a major pillar in the tourism strategy of many countries. Like elsewhere in the world, museums play a significant role in heritage tourism. South Africa has a rich history of intangible cultural heritage which manifests itself in oral history, traditional music and dance, social practices and indigenous knowledge systems. It is becoming more important for museum managers to identify the variables that will enhance the attraction and retention of museum visitors. The aim of the study was to determine tourists’ satisfaction with their visit to Port Elizabeth’s heritage museums by comparing their expectations and experiences. This could help museum marketers to better understand their customers, and design experiences that match their expectations. The literature review presented a brief overview of heritage tourism, the museum experience, and visitors’ satisfaction. Concepts of heritage tourism, functions of museums and the different museum attributes that might impact customer satisfaction were discussed. Literature on visitors’ satisfaction included descriptions of the expectations and approaches to measuring customer satisfaction. A museum satisfaction conceptual model resulted from these reviews. ii The proposed model was modified in the empirical study. The data were collected by means of a survey, using self-administered questionnaires distributed to visitors at three heritage museums in Port Elizabeth. Two hundred and twelve useable questionnaires were received. The empirical findings did not fully support the conceptual model. By conducting a factor analysis, the data was reduced to eight factors, namely, human interaction, physical evidence, facilities, facility quality, exhibition, edutainment, escape and aestheticism. It was found that the satisfaction mean scores were consistently higher than the expectation mean scores. This implies that museum visitors were satisfied with their experience of the three heritage museums in Port Elizabeth. Finally, the results of the paired sample t-test and regression analyses tested and explained formulated hypotheses. The principal recommendations emanating from this study are summarised in two groups, namely: • recommendations pertaining to the strategic implications of the findings in terms of service, facilities and experience. For example, the museum administration could establish more facilities for the disabled and the elderly, consider discounting and promotion programmes, and increase the use of technology in their displays. • recommendations for future research. For example, future studies could be applied to investigate visitors’ satisfaction with other heritage museums in South Africa.

The representation of national identity in museums of the 21st century´s diverse and multicultural societies is a challenging task. It is a task that involves questions of narrative and heritage inclusivity as well as questions of power and ideology. This thesis includes an investigation of the representation of the Turkish national identity in two state owned museums, one private museum and two contested heritage sites in Istanbul. Both contested sites were legally transformed from museums to mosques in 2020. The investigation also involves questions of power and legitimacy in the Turkish heritage sector in the past decade. Qualitative methods including observations, grounded theory initial coding, exhibition spatial syntax analysis and objects´ value analysis are used in the research. The analysis results revealed a fragmentation in the Turkish national identity representation and in the power structure of the Turkish heritage sector where different key actors are involved in national identity production and representation. The History narrative represented is linear and fragmented where each selected museum presents a different historical period with an emphasis on the multicultural nature of the region historically. Ideology and the heritage policy analysis has revealed that the Turkish heritage sector is heading towards an Ottoman based ideology instead of the secular Kemalism ideology that had built the modern Turkish national identity since the establishment of the republic in 1923.  The results show that the challenge of representing inclusive and sustainable heritage and national identities in multicultural societies is complex. However, to achieve that, museums and heritage sectors would have to adopt policies of recognition and civil society involvement. The state would have to take an architect role by funding the museum and heritage sector without interfering in museum´s function. This is a two years master’s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.<br>Representationen av nationella identiteter i museerna av 2000-talets mångkulturella samhälle är en utmanande uppgift. En uppgift som involverar frågor om integration, nationellt kulturarv och narrative inkludering samt frågor om makt och ideologi. Denna uppsats omfattar en undersökning av den turkiska nationella identitetsrepresentationen i två statliga museer och ett privat museum samt två omtvistade kulturarv i Istanbul. De två omtvistade platserna omvandlandes från museer till moskéer år 2020. Undersökningen omfattar också frågor om makt och legitimitet inom den turkiska kulturarvssektorn med fokus på det senaste decenniet. Kvalitativa metoder inklusive observationer, grundad teorins kodning, rumslig syntaxanalys och objekts analys används i forskningen. Analysresultaten avslöjade fragmenteringen av den turkiska nationella identitetsrepresentationen och maktstrukturen i den turkiska kulturarvssektorn där olika nyckelaktörer är involverade i representationen och produktionen av det turkiska nationella identitet. Det historienarrative som är representerat är linjärt och fragmenterad där varje utvalt museum presenterar en specifik historisk period med fokus på regionens mångkulturella historia. Ideologi och kulturarvspolitikanalysen har avslöjat att den turkiska kulturarvssektorn är på väg mot en ottomansk baserad ideologi i stället för den sekulära Kemalism-ideologin som byggde den moderna turkiska nationella identiteten sedan republiken grundades år 1923. Resultaten visar att utmaningen att representera inkluderande och hållbara kulturarv och nationella identiteter i multikulturella samhällen är komplex. För att uppnå detta måste emellertid museer och kulturarvssektorer överväga erkännandepolitik samt civilsamhällets-engagemangspolitik och staten måste ta en arkitektroll genom att finansiera museets och kulturarvssektorn med ett armslängdavstånd. Detta är ett tvåårigt examensarbete i Musei- och kulturarvsvetenskap.

The research project explores the trajectories of cultural heritage institutions in Mali and Ghana and their relationships with their publics in a range of contexts. The principal case studies are the National Museums of Mali and Ghana. Following on from cabinets of curiosities and the formation of modern public museums in Europe, periods of intense salvage ethnography in West Africa in the early 20th century enriched collections in Europe and shaped the organisations of collections of the future national museums in post independent West Africa. Within the conceptual frameworks of the civilizing missions of museums, indigenous material culture was displayed and positioned within rapidly changing societies as testimonies of pre-colonial pasts, albeit framed by colonial assumptions and contingencies. These re-presentations of cultural heritage are one of the many legacies that continue to haunt the museums today in West Africa. I examine whether the institutions have emerged from their colonial foundations to occupy a space in local African discourses and to what extent they are indeed able to do so. Colonial legacies associated with these institutions have incited a re-evaluation of the roles of the museum as appropriate avenues for stimulating local cultural knowledge according to a closer association with local audiences' perceived needs. Interesting initiatives have been set up across Mali and Ghana to foster local participation. As part of these initiatives, attention has focused on some rejections of museums by local groupings. Conceptually in this thesis I consider the category of the non-visitor as a means to analyse this phenomenon. The initiatives also serve to explore tensions over the management of cultural heritage(s), state agencies and the economic pull of tourism in the realm of museums today. Within the wider contexts of transnational museums, the thesis concludes with concerns over existing concepts of a universal heritage, questioning to what extent access to world cultures is universal within the framework of museum settings in West Africa.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (History)<br>This work responds to the perceptions of post-apartheid heritage practices as producing an authorised heritage discourse. It contrasts this perception by approaching the making of postapartheid heritage as not just a simple discourse, but as a broad and complicated network of many meanings, knowledges, practices and approaches. These are generated and disseminated through multiple disciplinary and practice inputs and outputs, and at different levels and scales. This work approaches these multiple intersecting points of heritage production and reproductions as an intricate network, within and through processes of heritage making can be seen as productive and unproductive. The focus of this work is in these different facets that emerge as different role players navigate through intricate negotiations of meanings and knowledges about pasts and presents. In this thesis, these workings are repeatedly identified through the term complex, which I use to mean complicated, intricate or convoluted. The analysis applies the term differently from the theoretical concept of complex, which refers to the making of public national citizenry through a power/knowledge, rather than power and knowledge discourse. This work therefore investigates the complicated workings of heritage by means of legislation, the complicated heritage governance by a council and agency, and the workings of heritage through equally complicated operations of museums and sites. The investigation involves focused ethnographic studies of the operations of the South African Heritage Resources Agency, National Heritage Council, Nelson Mandela Museum, Ncome Monument and Museum Complex, Freedom Park, and Robben Island Museum. While this work might be theoretically associated within Critical Heritage Studies, especially its recent preoccupation with the notion of authorised heritage discourse, it is framed against this concept. It argues that post-apartheid heritage is produced through intricate negotiations occurring within entanglements, rather than through simple a hegemonic discourse. It also argues that making heritage in post-apartheid South Africa occurs within a wide network of multiple practices and approaches, rather than along streamlined, simple deployments of dominant meanings and knowledges.