From ‘listener’ to ‘speaker’ museum visitors: guest book as a means of dialogue

ABSTRACT

Museum visitor studies acknowledge guest books as a potential source of information and a means of dialogue both among visitors and between visitors and museum staff. Nevertheless, the guest book is still under-used in the Italian museum context. Assuming this gap, this study aims at enlarging the understanding of that audience development method by an exploratory case study. More specifically, the guest book related to the main temporary exhibition, managed by an Italian Civic Museum in Lombardy, has been carried out through sentiment analysis. Findings introduce the taxonomy of ‘non-active’, ‘pre-active’, ‘active’ and ‘pro-active’ users, with the last two categories representing dialogue and visitor engagement in the museum evaluation process. Additional research paths on the correlation between the guest book form and the active users’ attitude are suggested. The case study also encourages more investigation on accountability and reporting within museum discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Guest book
• museum
• source of information
• dialogue
• evaluation process
• sentiment analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the alderman of Department of Culture and Tourism – Municipality of Pavia, Dr. Giacomo Galazzo, and the Director of Municipal Museums of Visconti Castle, Dr. Susanna Zatti for data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Michela Magliacani, is Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Pavia. She received the Ph.D. in Public Administration from the University of Siena. She teaches Business Plan, Financial Analysis and Public Administration. Her research field is focused on cultural heritage management. Moreover, she holds the position of Director of the Electrical Technology Museum and of Controller of the System of the Pavia University Museums. One of her main publication is “Managing Cultural Heritage. Eco-museums, Community Governance, Social Accountability”, Palgrave Macmillan (2015).

Elena Madeo, is Ph.D. Student in Economics and Management of Technology (DREAMT program), at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Pavia. Her main research interests are: fundraising; crowd-funding; public and non-profit organizations management. Her empirical analysis is focused on qualitative content analysis of text data.

Paola Cerchiello, Ph.D., is Senior Researcher of Statistics and Big Data Analysis at the Department of Economics and Management Science of the University of Pavia. Her research activity is mainly devoted to the study of statistical models for ordinal and qualitative data in economics and finance. From an applied viewpoint, she focuses on text data analysis, systemic risk, sentiment analysis. She has published around 35 papers in scientific international journals and has an H-index of 7 (calculated by Google scholar).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Municipality of Pavia, Department of Culture and Tourism [Grant number 36 of 2015, reference number 932 of 10-27-2015].