Museum communication and storytelling: articulating understandings within the museum structure

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to define museum communication as a useful concept and process by applying storytelling as a way of identifying museums’ interpretation, relevance and meaning-making focus. Although museums are very familiar with these terms, their impact on how museums communicate has rarely been defined. The paper offers a theoretical definition of museum communication and seeks to implement this in museum practice through the concept of storytelling and the way it influences internal and external museum communication. Defining a clear museum communication requires defining individual practices and approaches at museums as well. For the individual museum this can be approached by stating a clear museum communication definition but more importantly through empirical elements of storytelling. How museums define their communication and form narratives will impact both internal and external practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• storytelling
• meaning making
• interpretation
• relevance
• uniqueness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Jane K. Nielsen gained her Ph.D. in Museum and Heritage Communication at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She holds a MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, England, and a MA in Archaeology from Aarhus University, Denmark. She has been working as Project Manager developing museum cooperation and partnerships between museum organizations in her native Denmark and as Interpretation and Project Manager in the UK. Her areas of interest involve museum communication, participation and interpretation. She is currently working as Project Manager at the National Maritime Museum in London.

Notes

1. Interview with Director of Scottish Storytelling Centre, Dr Donald Smith in: Nielsen 2014. ‘Museum Communication: learning, interaction and experience’, School of Art History, University of St Andrews. Accessed 10 December 2014: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/5770.

2. MA in Museum Communication, University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Accessed 5 February 2015. http://www.uarts.edu/academics/camd-cross-college-programs/ma-museum-communication.

3. Accessed 5 March 2013. Among others: Center for the Future of Museums: http://www.futureofmuseums.org/, Communicating the Museum: http://agendacom.com/en/communicating_the_museum/ctm/, Engage: http://www.engage.org/home/index.aspx, Group for Education in Museums: www.gem.org.uk, International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM): http://network.icom.museum/icofom, MuseumsNext: http://www.museumnext.org/, National Association for Museum Exhibition: http://name-aam.org/home, The Strategic Museum: http://bcom.au.dk/research/academicareas/ccc/forskning/currentresearchprojects/detstrategiskemuseum/.

4. The American Alliance of Museums’ 2013 annual meeting and MuseumExpo was entitled ‘The Power of Story’.