När börjar ditt museibesök? : Kommunikation och tillgänglighet på museer

Sammanfattning: Accessibility and communication are important concepts applied in museology and museum sciences, but are they implemented optimally in museums today? We have chosen to explore the application of these concepts in two cultural institutions for this thesis: Lund University Historical Museum and Malmö Konsthall, and have studied their implementation of physical and digital communication, and accessibility. This combination has been chosen because we claim that both of these aspects are critical in making museums and other cultural institutions accessible to all. We have studied both the intentions of the cultural institutions and the visitor’s perspective in our analysis. Museums today use long-established communication methods but are also expected to adopt more current approaches, specifically those that include new technology. The result of this study shows that accessibility is a broadly defined term that covers many aspects. It is difficult for museums and other cultural institutions to incorporate all of them at once. The survey shows that visitors on average thought it was easy to find their way around the institutions despite the lack of signage or visual aids. The results from the observations, however, show that the visitors were confused and needed help from personnel to navigate. The use of museum receptionists and docents was invaluable to visitors and orientation. A museum visit is not confined to the physical location of the museum. The digital platforms these cultural heritage institutions use are also a part of the museum experience before and after the visit. Social media are instrumental in identity creation in this digital information age. Digital platforms are invaluable for visitors to plan visits, gather information about the museum and get details about ongoing exhibits. However, our results show that visitors are not using the social media platforms to the extent that was hypothesised. We propose that museums and other cultural heritage institutions use social media activity as a system of measurement in the same way as they count visitors today. The term “optimal accessibility” is used to denote an institution that has both accessible signage at the physical location as well as a website and social media accounts for outside the location.