Conceptions & Receptions: Examining Four Local Museums and Their Communities

Between 2017-2018, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), in partnership with Wilkening Consulting, found that 97% of the American public believe that museums are educational assets for their communities, and regardless of political persuasion, 96% approve of elected officials who support museums, and take legislative action to fund their operations. Additionally, 66% of all leisure travel in the United States involves cultural heritage sites or activities, such as visiting museums (AAM). The statistics presented here represent the AAM’s efforts to understand how museums, of all institutional type, are received by their communities and the general public on a national scale. The theme of community engagement has been a prevalent topic of debate and discussion among museum professionals across the country, and so this thesis seeks to examine how four local museums connect with their local audiences in meaningful and successful ways. With knowledge of the statistics presented by the AAM, this thesis research identified and analyzed community-museum relationships in three locations across the United States for the purpose of understanding how these inferences of museum successes are playing out on the microlevel. Utilizing relevant literature to diachronically examine museums, more generally, as institutions in the United States, this thesis first develops the historical underpinnings of cultural heritage preservation, management, and interpretation. With the incorporation of four local museums, as the foci of this research, this thesis also seeks to understand how local museums are situated within the present museological models motivated by education, community need, and cultural heritage tourism within the experience economy. Small and localized museums have the potential to intimately engage their community’s perceptions of identity, heritage, and assessed needs, and because the literary footprint surrounding cultural heritage and museums predominantly focuses on larger institutions like the Smithsonian, the MET, the Field Museum, etc., a lens must now attempt to illuminate the transformative potential of smaller, local museums. The Historical Museum at Fort Missoula (Missoula, M.T.), Strawbery Banke Museum (Portsmouth, N.H.), The Tuck Museum of Hampton History (Hampton, N.H.), and the James House Museum (Hampton, N.H.), were selected as case studies for this research. Having completed seven months of qualitative research that included participant-observation, semi-formal interviews, surveys, photographic documentation and document analysis, this presentation will summarize the results of this research and illuminate the complex socio-cultural, political, and economic contexts that influence community engagement tactics utilized by the leadership at each of the four museums