The Personalization of the Museum Visit examines a fundamental shift in institutional behavior in museums located in the United States and the United Kingdom. Contending that art museums have moved toward a new paradigm of public engagement, it posits that modern museum visitors are treated as self-directed "clients", with the agency to make meaning for themselves. The book then considers how this change has come about, examining factors such as the onset of a new museology, an experience economy, and a marketing revolution. Drawing on extensive research undertaken at Britain’s Tate Modern, the book examines a range of issues, including visitor engagement, curatorial practice, and museum management. A visit experience that is customizable to the individual visitor, in which curators and marketers work together with visitor-clients to create an experience of personalized meaning, is, Rodney argues, rising in prevalence in the art museum field, but it is also being stymied by certain structural impediments. This book examines such obstacles, including institutional division of labor, long-standing conceptions, or misconceptions, of the museum’s mission, and the orientation of museums toward a certain conceptual model of their visitors. The Personalization of the Museum Visit is essential reading for scholars and students engaging with issues of visitor engagement, curatorial practice, and museum management. With a particular focus on the role of business interests and public policy, the book should also be of interest to those undertaking research in fields outside of museum and visitor studies.

Visitor participation is a hot topic in the contemporary world of museums, art galleries, science centers, libraries and cultural organizations. How can your institution do it and do it well? The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. Museum consultant and exhibit designer Nina Simon weaves together innovative design techniques and case studies to make a powerful case for participatory practice. "Nina Simon's new book is essential for museum directors interested in experimenting with audience participation on the one hand and cautious about upending the tradition museum model on the other. In concentrating on the practical, this book makes implementation possible in most museums. More importantly, in describing the philosophy and rationale behind participatory activity, it makes clear that action does not always require new technology or machinery. Museums need to change, are changing, and will change further in the future. This book is a helpful and thoughtful road map for speeding such transformation." -Elaine Heumann Gurian, international museum consultant and author of Civilizing the Museum "This book is an extraordinary resource. Nina has assembled the collective wisdom of the field, and has given it her own brilliant spin. She shows us all how to walk the talk. Her book will make you want to go right out and start experimenting with participatory projects." -Kathleen McLean, participatory museum designer and author of Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions "I predict that in the future this book will be a classic work of museology." --Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums

Museums: filled with mysterious, magical art and curiosities? Or secrets? And what might happen if a boy suddenly became part of one of the mind-bending exhibits? Join the fun in Museum Trip, by Barbara Lehman, the author-illustrator of the Caldecott Honor–winning The Red Book.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, held in Trento, Italy, on June 22-26, 2009. This annual conference was merged from the biennial conference series User Modeling, UM, and the conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, AH. The 53 papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The tutorials and workshops were organized in topical sections on constraint-based tutoring systems; new paradigms for adaptive interaction; adaption and personalization for Web 2.0; lifelong user modelling; personalization in mobile and pervasive computing; ubiquitous user modeling; user-centred design and evaluation of adaptive systems.

Museum Informatics explores the sociotechnical issues that arise when people, information, and technology interact in museums. It is designed specifically to address the many challenges faced by museums, museum professionals, and museum visitors in the information society. It examines not only applications of new technologies in museums, but how advances in information science and technology have changed the very nature of museums, both what it is to work in one, and what it is to visit one. To explore these issues, Museum Informatics offers a selection of contributed chapters, written by leading museum researchers and practitioners, each covering significant themes or concepts fundamental to the study of museum informatics and providing practical examples and detailed case studies useful for museum researchers and professionals. In this way, Museum Informatics offers a fresh perspective on the sociotechnical interactions that occur between people, information, and technology in museums, presented in a format accessible to multiple audiences, including researchers, students, museum professionals, and museum visitors.

This book devises an alternative conceptual framework to understand digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector. It achieves this by placing a high importance on the role of technology in the strategic process of modeling and developing cultural services in the digital era. The focus is on how marketing activities and customer processes are being transformed by digital technologies to create better value, which can also be communicated to customers through an engaged and personalized approach. Much of the digital debate in cultural heritage is still in infancy. Some existing studies are anecdotal and often developed within the domain of established research streams, including studies with some technological aspects addressed partially and from an episodic or periodic perspective. Moreover, the critical changes that have emerged in the cultural management landscape are yet to be highlighted. This book fills that gap and provides a perspective on the cultural heritage sector, which uses the new social and technology landscape to describe the digital transformation in cultural heritage sectors. The authors highlight an inclusive perspective that addresses marketing strategy in the digital era as a proactive, technology-enabled process by which firms collaborate with customers to jointly create, communicate, deliver, and sustain experience and value co-creation.

This book contributes to illustrating the methodological and technological issues of data management in Pervasive Systems by using the DataBenc project as the running case study for a variety of research contributions: sensor data management, user-originated data operation and reasoning, multimedia data management, data analytics and reasoning for event detection and decision making, context modelling and control, automatic data and service tailoring for personalization and recommendation. The book is organized into the following main parts: i) multimedia information management; ii) sensor data streams and storage; iii) social networks as information sources; iv) context awareness and personalization. The case study is used throughout the book as a reference example.

Exhibitions as Research contends that museums would be more attractive to both researchers and audiences if we consider exhibitions as knowledge-in-the-making rather than platforms for disseminating already-established insights. Analysing the theoretical underpinnings and practical challenges of such an approach, the book questions whether it is possible to exhibit knowledge that is still in the making, whilst also considering which concepts of "knowledge" apply to such a format. The book also considers what the role of audience might be if research is extended into the exhibition itself. Providing concrete case studies of projects where museum professionals have approached exhibition making as a knowledge-generating process, the book considers tools of application and the challenges that might emerge from pursuing such an approach. Theoretically, the volume analyses the emergence of exhibitions as research as part of recent developments within materiality theories, object-oriented ontology and participatory approaches to exhibition-making. Exhibitions as Research will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museology, material culture, anthropology and archaeology. It will also appeal to museum professionals with an interest in current trends in exhibition-making.

The influence of digital media on the cultural heritage sector has been pervasive and profound. Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site. However, ‘digital heritage’ (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is complex, diverse and distributed, and its content is available through multiple channels, on varied media, in myriad locations, and different genres of writing. It is this diaspora of material and practice that this Reader is intended to address. With over forty chapters (by some fifty authors and co-authors), from around the world, spanning over twenty years of museum practice and research, this volume acts as an aggregator drawing selectively from a notoriously distributed network of content. Divided into seven parts (on information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production and futures), the book presents a series of cross-sections through the body of digital heritage literature, each revealing how a different aspect of curatorship and museum provision has been informed, shaped or challenged by computing. Museums in a Digital Age is a provocative and inspiring guide for any student or practitioner of digital heritage.

Personal Experience with Active Cultural Heritage, PEACH, is a large, interdisciplinary development project that explores the use of novel technologies for physical museum visits. This book represents a coherent survey of the relevant technologies and environment, and will benefit AI researchers engaged with interface design, and practitioners in the area of cultural heritage support and marketing. No other book has comparable technical insight and breadth.