Attingham 2010: Atmospheric Pressure

So today was a quite interesting visit to Hardwick Hall, a 1590s retreat for the Countous Elizabeth Shroesbury while estranged from her forth husband, the Earl of Shroesbury. This was an interesting site with some of the best textiles in the world, including 16th century tapestries and embroideries; it also had something more -- atmospheric pressures.

The National Trust, the owner of Hardwick Hall, started in recent years an interpretive program of atmospheric design. What I mean by this is incorporating as many of the fie senses into the visit as possible. Such examples would be musi playing in the background that was relevant, touch objects where appropriate and understood, and different smells including such examples as those of cigars or coal and wood burning fireplaces. But, this also introduces time specific interpretations as in morning, afternoon, evening, or night.

The National Trust has had mixed results with this atmospheric interpretation program and it seems they may have had a heavy hand in initiating the program. As for Hardwick Hall, it did not really work, but I think this could work for the right place quite well. The key is to interpret a specific day and time. Do a lighting survey to figure out exactly where candles would have been places, if candles are appropriate for your time period. Don't have the smell of a fire if the day being interpreted is in the middle of the summer, and such other points.

Overall, I do think such a program can work quite well, but only for the right place. I am sure there are others who think otherwise. I see it as a way of doing first person interpretations without the person. Can you think of how it may work at Dumbarton House, or maybe Dumbarton house would not be a good fit - any suggestions?

Attingham 2010: A Tale of Two Interpretations

A study in how to handle a fire -- visits to Uppark and Cowdray Castle. Actually, it was not so much on how to handle a fire as how to interpret a place after a fire or diseaster occurs. Uppark country house burned in a fierce fire in 1989, and today there are but only a very few remnants of the fire that remain. The house was rebuilt to the day before the fire, including all the interiors and the collections. While all but at most a dozen of the pieces on the first floor were saved, those not saved were recreated to an exactness of the originals. Here is the question of debate; the pieces that were recreated completely or more than a significant percentage, should they continue to be seen as period pieces? Four busts sitting in niches in the dining room are completely recreated, and yet they were presented to the group as being from 1802-5.

Before coming back to the thought, I want to also share Cowdray Castle. Cowdray burned in 1793 and is currently presented as an architectural ruin. This was a massive Tudor castle with a center courtyard. After being studied and stabilized to prevvent any walls from falling, in the past decade it was opened for tourists to visit. In general, nearly nothing was recreated and that which was was openly discussed.

So, whicch interpretation is better? For whom? Should Cowdray have been returned to its original glory, or possibly should Uppark have been turned into a ruin? Please view pictures of both places on my previous blog entry and share your thoughts.

Attingham 2010: Week One Site Review - Part 1

I wrote a second installment the other day pertaining to Attingham 2010, but it would not copy and paste into the blog template. When I am a bit more energetic, I will re-write it for some thought provoking discussion I hope. In the mean while, please enjoy some of my pictures from the past week.

The first two pictures are both of West Dean Park (West Dean College). Originally built around 1650, West Dean Park became what it is today more between the years of 1804 and 1830. Architect James Wyatt, father of the famed Benjamin Wyatt is responsible for the design. While West Dean once was an Elizabethan house, it was largely rebuilt around 1622 and so few parts, if any, of the original house even exist today.

While using West Dean as our home, the Attingham class of 2010 visited such places as Uppark in Sussex and Cowdray Park in West Sussex. Both of these properties had major fires in their lives, one, Uppark was completely rebuild to the way it looked the day before the fire in 1989. Cowdray on the other hand burned in 1793 and was neer rebuilt, instead presented as a ruin. These are the two houses that my original second writing was to be about (to be posted at a later date).

I do hope it is obvious as to which desided to rebuild and which did not! Uppark, like West Dean, was originally built as a small place in the Elizabethan era. In the second half of the 17th century it was greatly enlarged by Lord Grey of Werke. Ahortly there after, in the middle of the 18th century, Sir Matthew Featherstonhaugh re-created the house much to the form seen today.

Cowdray was a bit older house, first built as a castle during the Tudor Period. This too, like so many others, was demolished and a new structure was built principally on the original foundation in the 1520s. In 1591, then owner 1st Viscount Montague wrote Book of Rules and Orders which pertained to life at Cowdray and provides much of the information now know about the structure.

I will continue brief day-by-day, in a multi-day format such as this, write-ups for the next few days. Please do share any comments or thoughts you may have.

Welcome from the Attingham Summer School: Day 1

Greetings from England. I want to start by introducing myself as the Museum Curator at Dumbarton House and explain the Attingham Summer School. Earlier this spring I was fortunate to be selected for the Attingham Summer School, a program in which scholars, curators, gardeners, architects, conservators, and leaders in the museum and complimentary fields are brought together each year in England for three weeks to study the Country House, it's gardens, owners, collections, and architecture, as well as issues and concerns of the past and the present that these houses need to deal with today, tomorrow, and in the future. We also learn about what worked in the past and what did not.

With an introductory tour and recception yesterday, July 1, at Apsley House and the V&A in London, we headed off today for West Dean College. Of course the customary tea greeted our group upon arrival and the 23 Americans and 26 non-Americans (participants from around Europe, as well as India, Australia, and New Zealand) started to prepare for what will be three weeks of intensive study and learning in the serenity of sheep filled pastures and 18th-century coutry houses.

I am sitting here by my window tonight thinking about the lecture that finished justed a few hours ago - Who Owns the Country House? by Jeremy Musson. While America is not thought of all to often as having the same granduer of country houses, they did and do exist. The first location for them that comes to my mind is Newport, then of course Nantucket and the Hudson River Valley to name just a few. But while several entities own the houses here in England, who owns them in America? I do understand that the dating is a bit different, by a century or two (sometimes even three), but in England, as Musson discussed, there are five main owners: private, institutional, local government, English Heritage, and the National Trust.

Lets look at this in another way that relates a little more to Dumbarton House; who owns the historic house or historic house museum in America? I think this is a better comparison than the country houses in America, even though it is not necessarily a direct one. Dumbarton House and Lyndhurst, just to name two, are both owned by private non-profits (The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America and The National Trust for Historic Preservation, respectively), while other places like the Clara Barton National Historic Site (Clara Barton House) is owned by the National Park Service. In Chicago, the Nickerson Mansion is privately owned, yet open to the public, and an example of institutional ownership would be The Highlands owned by Sidwell Friends School (originally owned by the Nourse family).

Once Musson's lecture is really comtemplated, the country house in England and the historic house in America are not that much different. Yes, maybe the sizes are not so relative, nor the original owners, but in the present time, many issues that are to be discussed in the Attingham Summer School will have comparable similarities to the 8,000 to 15,000 historic house museums in the United States, not to mention the historic houses that have been saved, or issued a new, second life as something else. (numerical resource: Pew Charitable Trust)

As I leave you this evening, the rain is coming down and the sheep are calling just outside my window. Please think about who owns the historic house museum in America and how does this effect the successes and failures of the houses and their property?

Reach Advisors Survey Points to Visitor Preferences

Our recent roundtable conversations have frequently touched on the "delivery method" historic house museums have typically used to present their collections & interpretation to their visitors--the guided tour.

A recent survey by Reach Advisors of over 40,000 core museum visitors contains some surprising data about visitor preferences--and they're lack of preference for guided tours, even in historic sites. To read more about their findings, and some of the dialogue it's spurring online, visit: Reach Advisors Survey

I'll post some of my thoughts about these findings, and about yesterday's Roundtable discussion, in the days ahead. In the meantime, I welcome your comments about the Reach Advisors survey or guided tours in general!

First Person Interpretation: Why Does it Make Me So Nervous?

For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed throwing myself into the middle of the action.

At Disney MGM Studios with my family, I was the overly-enthusiastic kid in the audience, hand thrust into the air as soon as a volunteer was requested, smiling broadly on stage as I assisted with the presentation on creating sound effects in movies.

At sites like Colonial Williamsburg, I got a kick out of marching around behind the costumed interpreters by the armory and asking the blacksmith a million questions about his craft.

So, I wasn’t at all surprised when I read the following finding of the Colonial Williamsburg visitor study profiled by Conny Graft in her 2007 article, “Listen, Evaluate, Respond!”:

“First, guests wanted more interactive and engaging experiences…Guests wanted to see more costumed people mingle in and out of original and restored buildings. In fact, they wanted us to flood the streets with hundreds of costumed people twenty-four hours a day!"

Personally, I can totally relate to the visitors’ desire to immerse themselves in the past evoked at Colonial Williamsburg. So then why do I professionally look down my nose at the idea of costumed, first-person interpreters at "my" historic site?

In our March Roundtable we spent a lot of time on this very question and came to what may be at the heart of the conflict:

As a visitor, what we’re looking for in first person interpretation is largely ambiance--a reinforcement of the period so that we can feel transported to the past and perhaps reminded that it was a very real place inhabited by real folks just like you and me.

As a history museum professional, however, what we’re looking for in first person interpretation is high quality historical authenticity. We take great pains to ensure our volunteer docents (giving third person tours) share accurate accounts of the past; and that they understand our period and our house and our collection deeply enough to avoid broad historical generalizations of “the olden days.”

That authenticity is what scares me so much about first person interpretation. How far do we take it? Clearly the costume should be authentic, but what about the shoes? Or the hair? Or the makeup? What about the accents of Americans living in Georgetown in 1810 or appropriate 19th century vocabulary?

If done “wrong”, could first person interpretation send visitors away with a total misunderstanding of the period of the past we are trying to represent? Or would first person interpretation provide a charming, engaging interaction with the past to visitors who never asked us for a history lesson anyway?

I, for one, am still not ready to convert our institution to a living history museum…but I will think twice about the possibilities for first person interpretation at "my" site in the future.

Does Size Matter for Effective Visitor Evaluation?

Those of you who know me, know that I have a soft spot in my heart for Colonial Williamsburg due to my fabulous four years as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. And in my last post you may have read my kudos to CW for providing a model of visitor evaluation from which all of us in the historic site field could learn.

But, I’m left to wonder how those of us at smaller institutions can realistically undertake similar evaluation projects. The visitor study discussed in Conny Graft’s 2007 article, “Listen, Evaluate, Respond!” included ten-months of in-home interviews, guest journaling, employee surveys, literature reviews, and e-mail satisfaction surveys. Meanwhile, here at Dumbarton House, our passionate, experienced, and overworked 8-person full-time staff struggles to find the time to routinely collate and analyze simple comment cards. If it’s difficult for us to consistently gather visitor feedback, I can only imagine how daunting the prospect must be to institutions with even fewer paid staff.

I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop on visitor evaluation led by Graft in November at AASLH’s intensive professional development program, the Seminar for Historical Administration. At that workshop, Graft stressed that visitor studies could be undertaken at institutions of any size and any budget. While I left the workshop energized, I’ve emerged from 5 months back in the trenches a bit skeptical.

Though skeptical, I’m also more convinced than ever that evaluation is critical to our success as an institution. So, I’m seeking out other models--sites that have undergone meaningful visitor studies and worked to successfully integrate evaluation into their practice, without the benefit of a professional evaluator on staff.

In the meantime, Dumbarton House is moving forward and learning along the way, with our education and marketing staff conducting online surveys of visitors and community members as part of our interpretive planning process. Who knows? Maybe our own experience will prove useful to other small & medium sized historic institutions looking for a realistic way to gather visitor feedback with limited staffing and limited budgets.

Evaluating and Responding to Our Visitors

For our March Roundtable, our group read Conny Graft’s 2007 History News article, “Listen, Evaluate, Respond! The Colonial Williamsburg Visitor Research Story.” Our conversation took some unpredicted turns, and hovered on the topics of relevancy and first person interpretation--both of which I’ll explore in greater depth in future blog posts. More generally, our group emerged impressed with Colonial Williamsburg’s strategic approach to visitor evaluation and curious to hear more about recent developments with their Revolutionary City program.

In deciding to undertake a comprehensive visitor study, an institution must first be willing to open itself up to criticism and then be willing to actually consider that visitor input when making future decisions. While I consider myself to be a strong advocate for visitor study and evaluation, I can certainly understand the very real hesitation some of us may feel before undertaking such a project. It’s never easy to hear from people that what you’re doing might not be having its intended effect and it’s even harder to hand over some level of control for future programming decisions to the visitors themselves.

I commend Colonial Williamsburg for facing those fears head on, and for then using that feedback to fundamentally alter their visitor experience. And I’d love to hear about how it’s going for them currently--in terms of visitation, visitor satisfaction, and new program development. So if you know of any recent articles, blog posts, or reports on CW, please pass them along.

In the end, I believe this kind of evaluation--and the self reflection that must follow--strengthens our institutions, ensuring that we can continue to preserve history for future generations to come.

Creating & Leveraging Museum Advocates

The concept of “museum advocates” really stood out for me while reviewing the Museums and Society 2034 study in advance of our February Roundtable discussion. The idea of a segment of the population--a subset of those who visit our sites--who value museums as truly vital parts of their lives and the lives of their communities, makes complete sense to me. While there may be many casual museum-goers, there is a far smaller group of folks out there who will really advocate on behalf of museums.

The challenge for those of us working in the museum field, the report suggests, is two-fold: first, to create as many museum advocates as possible and then to leverage those advocates to ensure our institutions remain well-supported for generations to come.

So how do we face these two challenges head on?

Creating museum advocates seems to be the simpler of the two. Since the author reports that nearly all advocates “have a distinct memory of a specific, seminal museum experience, usually between the ages of 5 and 9,” the key rests on our ability to create those experiences for as broad a range of 5-9 year-olds as possible. Luckily, museums have largely proven their ability to program effectively for children--with the bulk of museum youth and family programs focused on elementary-school-aged students.

Leveraging those museum advocates, after they’re hooked on museums, seems more challenging to me. I attend community meetings here in Georgetown on behalf of Dumbarton House, and we try to maintain strong relationships with a variety of community groups. We participate in neighborhood events and offer our space as a venue when appropriate, but I constantly wonder if there isn’t more we could be doing. How do we ensure that our community believes we’re not just “nice to have” in the neighborhood, but absolutely necessary.

If we want to remain truly vital, then it seems to me that our paid and volunteer staff can’t be the only ones proclaiming the value of our historic site. To be successful, and sustainable, we need respected community members to make the case on our behalf as well.

So, I, too, would love to hear from our blog readers. What are you doing to recruit the museum advocates in your community to support your institution? Have you seen any great examples at other institutions? How can we as a field better leverage those museum advocates we hooked as 5-9 year-olds, now that they’re adults?

Dear My First Museum - Thanks for Everything! - Love, Advocate

If one of Dolley Madison's* necklaces had come unstrung, madly scattering pearls to each corner of our Belle Vue Room venue, those pearls would hardly have been able to compete with the many directions into which our last Director's Roundtable discussion sent conversation threads streaming! Our participants tore into the reading as enthusiastically as Dolley's dinner guests, steamed by partisanship and Washington's swampy summers, would have spooned into their oyster ice cream. The topic was "Demographic Trends in Museums," and the reading was a recent report by the Center for the Future of Museums, Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures (AAM, 2008).


If the Museums and Society 2034 report presented a massive bucket of oysters that we tried to shuck as quickly as possible in our limited roundtable timeframe, one of the biggest pearls we found first was in the concept of "Museum Advocates," a group the report's authors identified based on surveys administered to 30,000 core museum visitors. As Page 6 of the report defines the group, "Museums are not just places that they visit on occasion, but are especially important places in their lives where they truly enjoy spending their leisure time. And what distinguishes Museum Advocates from other people? Nearly all have a distinct memory of a specific, seminal museum experience, usually between the ages of 5 and 9."


Moreover, given that the U.S. population is currently one-third minority (as defined within the article, non-white), and rapidly moving toward majority-minority, while core museum visitors are currently only 9% minority and museum employees only 20% minority, the report continues on to ask:  "If 5 to 9 is the critical age for converting children into lifelong museumgoers and advocates, how can museums attract minority children in this age range whose support they want in 2034?"


Which brings us to our first discussion question, presented on a silver platter as graciously as if Dolley had served it up herself:  Do YOU identify with this group of Museum Advocates? If so, describe your "seminal museum experience!" How and why did it make you an advocate? For instance, one of our extremely accomplished collections interns mentioned that once she had viewed the First Ladies (gowns) Collection exhibit at the Smithsonian, she was hooked for life! This seems like such a textbook example of the seminal museum experience - a trajectory that launches with a trip to a museum and ends up with a graduate-educated author, teacher, and museum professional in the history of fashion - that many of us were dying to learn more about it. Time did not permit discussion of this and other fascinating (and, I imagine, well-clad) journeys to museum advocacy, hence the inspiration for this online chat.


If you are not too busy advocating for museums at this very moment, I hope you all will share, whether or not you were able to attend the roundtable!




*P.S. I confess to having Dolley Madison on the brain, as Dolley is one of Dumbarton House's Very Important Visitors and the PBS "American Experience" documentary on Dolley premiered at the beginning of this week. (If you missed the episode, a fun and, I think, fair review of it appeared in The Washington Post - and there is always Netflix.)