Articulating the visitor in public knowledge institutions

Abstract

This article analyses visitor articulations used by managers and key documents of three Estonian public knowledge institutions. Three visitor articulations were identified in the analysed material, namely visitors as the people, as target groups, and as stakeholders, each related in this article to a specific body of literature. These articulations are co-existent semantic tools, used by public knowledge institutions to make sense of the complex relationships with people that cross the boundaries protecting the institutions from the outside world(s). They show how Estonian museum and library culture has sought to balance the more traditional educational paradigm with marketing-driven and democratic paradigms. Despite these changes, the article also argues that all three articulations have a significant role to play in organising the institutional governance of the visitors, enabling visitors to, and disabling them from, performing specific practices. Although the third visitor articulation (the visitor as stakeholder) holds the promise of a more democratised relationship between visitors and institutions, even in this case, we can still see the logics of governmentality at work.

Keywords:

• public knowledge institutions
• libraries
• museums
• library and museum culture
• stakeholders
• target groups
• visitors
• articulation
• governmentality

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful for the support of the ETF, research grant no. 8006.

Notes

In this analysis, the specific connotations of the signifier ‘visitor’ (which are also manifold) are not problematised; the visitor is used here as a container concept, which is stabilised in order to allow for the analysis of the three articulations of the visitor, as people, target groups and stakeholders.

Prior to this, in 1969, Kotler and Levy had migrated the concept to the world of non-business organisations.

These debates are usually supported by word ‘eestimaalane' (instead of ‘eestlane', that is ethnic Estonian) referring to ‘the one living in Estonia' (Sillaste, Kirch & Kirch, 1999, p. 18) regardless ethnicity. Compared to ‘Swedish, the Baltic Germans and the “old” Russian minorities' (Petersoo, 2007, p. 125) who were seen as ‘sufficiently similar to Estonians' (Petersoo, 2007, p. 125) the perception of Russian minority in Estonia has needed more time for changing and improving (Petersoo, 2007).

The Estonian National Museum, founded in 1909, then contained both oral and material heritage. It was divided in 1940 into the National Ethnography Museum and the National Literary Museum. The University of Tartu Library (as we know it now) was established in 1802 (Tankler, 1997). All three institutions are open to the general public.

The following abbreviations are used: the Estonian National Museum (ENM), the Estonian Literary Museum (ELM), and the University of Tartu Library (UTL).

Charmaz (2006, pp. 59–60) defines identifying moments as implicit notions that are at some point openly discussed.

All three institutions have, since their foundation, relied on their social networks and collaboration with their visitors to improve their collections either with the aid of correspondents or donors for whom helping is a manifestation of patriotism (Õunapuu, 2011) or a matter of honour (Tankler, 1997, p. 117). Yet the correspondents (and donors in the library context) are still regarded ‘rather as sources of information and authenticity for the museum' (Runnel, Tatsi, & Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, 2011, p. 333) than active interpreters of culture.

Exceptions mainly concern media professionals who use the collections of public knowledge institutions for research.

This concerns both ‘the effectiveness of the instruments and the certainty of the results' and its ‘proportion to the possible cost (be it the economic cost of the means brought into operation, or the cost in terms of reaction constituted by the resistance which is encountered)' (Foucault, 1983, p. 224).