'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.

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 base and 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.

List of illustrations
Preface. Acknowledgements Book Introduction: Meeting the demands placed on the twenty-first century museum
Section 1: Museum Audiences: Their nature, needs and expectations Introduction 1. Traditional Museum Audiences: A quantitative and qualitative analysis
Case Study: Lessons for tourism research
2
Developing New Audiences
Case Study: Developing museum content for young children and families with babies/young children
Section 2: Operating for Quality
Introduction 3
Stimulating the Visit
Case Study: Re-positioning Manchester Art Gallery
4
Visitor Services: Operating for quality
Case Study: Adapting Servqual to measure visitor services Section 3: Learning in Museums
Introduction 5
Museums and Lifelong Learning
Case Study: Evaluating visitor learning in museums 6
Use of Museums by Schools
Case Study: Education resource packs/websites Section 4: Planned to Engage: Using interpretation to develop museum displays and associated services
Introduction 7. Applying the Principles of Interpretation to Museum Display
Case Study: Exhibition standards/guidelines 8
Interpretive Master Planning
Case Study: Process mapping 9
Concept Development for Museum Galleries Case Study: A design brief for a small gallery at New Walk Museum, Leicester, UK 10
The Engaging Museum
Case Study: The visitor response Bibliography Index