STSanchez 's List: Books: Display Exhibits

This handbook is essential for all those who are concerned with mounting educational exhibitions, whether they be administrators, designers, educationalists, planners or in specific subject areas.

A Practical tool to unlock the mechanics of exhibition design and production.

Understanding the visitor experience provides essential insights into how museums can affect people’s lives. Personal drives, group identity, decision-making and meaning-making strategies, memory, and leisure preferences, all enter into the visitor experience, which extends far beyond the walls of the institution both in time and space. Drawing upon a career in studying museum visitors, renowned researcher John Falk attempts to create a predictive model of visitor experience, one that can help museum professionals better meet those visitors’ needs. He identifies five key types of visitors who attend museums and then defines the internal processes that drive them there over and over again. Through an understanding of how museums shape and reflect their personal and group identity, Falk is able to show not only how museums can increase their attendance and revenue, but also their meaningfulness to their constituents.

Informal science is a burgeoning field that operates across a broad range of venues (museums, media outlets, state parks, science clubs, after-school programs), and envisages learning outcomes for individuals, schools, families, and society. The evidence base that describes informal science, its promise, and effects is informed by a range of disciplines and perspectives, including field-based research, visitor studies, and psychological and anthropological studies of learning. Learning Science in Places and Pursuits draws together disparate literatures, synthesizes the state of knowledge, and articulates a common framework for the next generation of research on learning science in informal environments across a life span. Contributors include recognized experts in a range of disciplines — research and evaluation, exhibit designers, program developers and educators. They also have experience in a range of settings — museums, after-school programs, science and technology centers, media enterprises, aquariums, zoos, and botanical gardens. Learning Science in Places and Pursuits is an invaluable guide for program and exhibit designers, evaluators, staff of science-rich informal learning institutions and community-based organizations, scientists interested in educational outreach, federal science agency education staff, and K-12 science educators. Philip Bell, Bruce Lewenstein, Andrew W. Shouse, and Michael A. Feder, Editors Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments National Research Council