A brief history of my history with history museums

My history with history museums starts with this guy:

My dad bought this figurine for me when I was six years old.  I picked it out from all of the other glass animals in the small little gift shop that is still on the ground floor of the Field Museum several hours before it opened to other patrons after one of the best nights of my life.

My family had always been a museum-going one, and my parents made it a point to take my sister and I to a big museum every time we were in the city.  So I was primed and ready when my dad told us that we--along with a hundred or so other folks--were going to spend the night at the Field Museum.  It was a part of a program called "Dozin' with the Dinos," where parents and children come in to the museum after it closes with sleeping bags and pajamas and do crafts, take tours, and explore the museum late into the night.  Basically it is a little kid's dream come true.

It was almost twenty-five years ago, so a lot of the details a blurry.  I remember going to orientation in the big theater and having a security guard tell me that I wasn't allowed to touch the bronze statue I was touching.  But more than just yelling at me, she took a moment to explain that the reason I couldn't was because the oils on my little hands would damage the metal.  I haven't touched a statue since, scout's honor.  I remember trying to pick the very best spot to lay out my threadbare green sleeping bag, and ending up next to this guy:

At that time the Pawnee Earth Lodge was still in this hall, but it's otherwise unchanged. One of my favorite things when I worked at the Field was when an errand would take me through this hall and I could walk past the same spot I'd set up my sleeping bag so many years ago.  My family set up with a few other families we knew and a bunch of other people we didn't, and then set out to explore the museum.

Looking at the program now, we must have had some workshops, there was dinner and a midnight snack at some point, and we probably made some crafts, but I don't remember any of that.  What I remember was that some time around midnight (an inconceivable time to my tiny mind) they turned off the lights and told us any further exploring would have to be done by flashlight.  My dad armed Sister and I with flashlights and we set off to go through Ancient Egypt.

I don't think I will ever be closer to the feeling a scientist on the verge of a discovery has than I did that night.  It didn't matter that we'd been through that exhibit dozens of times in the well-lit day--every artifact was newly-discovered in the wavering beam of my flashlight.  It was the most terrifying and exhilarating night of my life to that point, and while the details have faded over the years, that thrill of discovery and excitement lingers.  And I've been lost to history museums ever since.

The next morning Dad let me pick out a figurine, and I've kept that little leopard with me ever since.  Every time I look at it on my desk I'm reminded of that night, and it makes me excited to try to bring that same feeling to other little kids.  And while I'm sure that art museums and science centers bring the same joy to others, for me it's always going to be the history museums.  They've been blowing my mind for as long as I can remember.  Seriously: dinosaurs.  mummies.  life-sized adobe pueblos and honest-to-goodness meteorites. lions and tigers and bears and little glass leopards. Oh, my indeed.

Hello, your Excellencies.

So here's a question that's been on my mind while thinking about museum marketing: what does it take to get people in the door?  You all are probably not the best audience for this question, as I suspect people who read an amateur museum blog voluntarily are not folks who need a lot of convincing to visit an institution of learning.  But think about your less-erudite friends, or family members who perhaps prefer March Madness to mummies (not that you can't enjoy both, I know).  What have you said to them to get them in the doors to an exhibit you're dying to see?

From my own past experience I can claim success with the 'limited time' argument: and exhibit will only be here a finite amount of time, this is my/our only chance to see it, so we're going.  ("End of discussion," as my mother would say.)  Another tactic goes hand in hand with the unrelated exhibits post from earlier--bringing in a different type of exhibit brings in a different type of patron.  For example, I'm willing to bet that a number of people showed up for the Harry Potter exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago a few years back who have never ridden on the coal mine.  (I don't have hard data to back me up, just a pretty strong hunch.)

Anyway, beyond my general ponderings about museums and marketing and awesome ad campaigns, thinking about this made me realize something kind of important:  You and I and all the museum lovers out there are ambassadors.  

We all have people in our lives who would never walk into a history center or art exhibit on their own, and part of loving museums is introducing others to them.  YOU know that learning about the history or the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes in central Florida is a totally awesome way to spend an afternoon, and I know that learning about the history of the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes in central Florida is an awesome way to spend an afternoon, but too many people out there don't.  And it's time they did, right?

So for the next four weeks I'm proposing a personal cultural exchange program.  I'm going to make an effort to get at least one person, be it friend, family, or stranger, to walk through a museum or exhibit they would not have chosen to see on their own.  In return I am more than willing to sit through baseball games and poker tournaments, because fair is fair, but I am going to make it a personal goal of mine to get more people in my immediate circle into museums to see what they're missing.  Will keep you posted on progress!

Museum Moment

One of those things that I don't think happens much at other offices:

As I went to drop off the mail this morning I passed an 8-year-old boy in his summer camp uniform singing Alicia Keys at the top of his lungs as he wandered through the Egypt exhibit.  ("NO one, NO one, NO OOONNNEEEEE...")