Digital Information Access in Cultural Institutions
Eliminating Elitism on Museum Websites
Access to museum digital materials for visitors of varying socioeconomic backgrounds
How accessible are museum websites for visitors of different socioeconomic backgrounds?
What barriers currently exist to meaningful engagement with museum websites?
By Jesse Ludington
Museums Have an Elitism Problem
It will come as no surprise to many that some people don’t necessarily feel welcome in museums. In countless eras and cultures throughout human history, the subjects commonly covered in museums--art, historical research, and science--have been viewed as the domain of the ivory tower, interests pursued by only the elites and scholars of their respective societies. As Yuha Jung notes in The Ignorant Museum: Transforming the Elitist Museum Into an Inclusive Learning Place, drawing on the work of David Fleming, “David Fleming argues that museums have excluded socio-economically less fortunate groups of people ‘not by accident but by design.’ In part to ensure their financial viability, museums have restricted themselves to meeting the needs and interests of educated, middle-class, economically powerful people.”
Visitors who are not middle to upper class face issues of exclusion not typically thought of when museum professionals think about accessibility. Although these are not accessibility issues in the sense of disability, they are nonetheless crucial to making museums inclusive and welcoming spaces. The accessibility issues facing people of lower socioeconomic statuses range from parsing dense academic jargon, to not having ‘insider knowledge’ about art history, to feeling uncomfortable not knowing the unspoken etiquette of museum visitors.
Unfortunately, these issues of socioeconomic exclusion also extend to the digital presence of museums, such as their websites. On museum websites, this lack of inclusion is even starker than in physical museums. Walsh, Hall, Clough, and Foster (2020) found in their study of the National Museums Liverpool website that although the website’s biggest user base consists of “General Public” and “Non-professional” groups (other groups include Students, Academics, Teachers, and Museum Staff), these users also have a much higher bounce rate from the website. The study found that 71% of users who reported they only viewed one page on the NML website were from the “General Public” and “Non-professional” groups.
Case Study: Art Museums Online: Building Cultural Capital Using Interactive Websites
Wendy Quinlan-Gagnon (2011)
In Chapter Five, “Art Museums Online: Building Cultural Capital Using Interactive Websites” of her dissertation titled Communication and the changing roles of public art museums: Lessons for museum professionals, Wendy Quinlan-Gagnon conducts a case study of the home pages of four museums: the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Gallery of Canada. Through Quinlan-Gagnon’s analysis, she discovers several examples of ways these museums both fail and succeed regarding socioeconomic inclusion.
A Few of Quinlan-Gagnon's Observations (emphasis my own):
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"All four of these home pages present clear, uncomplicated information that can be easily understood. They use visually compelling images that draw the viewer in. Hyperlinks for further navigation are clearly labelled. That said, exhibition posters or mastheads picturing unidentified artists on two of the sites (Warhol, Haring and Koons on the NGC home page to advertise 'Pop Life' and Chaplin on the MoMA home page to advertise an 'Auteurist History of Film,' for example), could be considered exclusionary—with web designers or museum staff assuming that viewers would have the knowledge or experience to recognise the art, the artist or the film-maker without having them identified...In fact, calling the MoMA film event an 'Auteurist History of Film' could itself be considered exclusionary, as not everyone would be familiar with auteur theory or understand the meaning of the word 'auteurist.' These actions could constitute more of the barriers that may prevent some potential publics from enjoying the art museum experience."
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"Unlike the NGC and the MFA home pages, the MoMA and Tate Modern home pages also display dynamic pictures of goods from their shops. While the items from the Tate Modern shop are quite discreet, the large picture of watches used to advertise the MoMA shop seems out of place on an art museum site— sending a signal, perhaps, that shopping is just as important as viewing at this institution. And since these are 'designer' watches, all relatively expensive, this also reinforces the idea that the museum is targeting individuals from a certain income bracket, perhaps sending another subtle message of exclusion (Bourdieu, 2004) to its less wealthy visitors."
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"...visitors need verbal, visual and aural literacy to manipulate these sites and enable them to enter at multiple points and navigate their own routes through or around them."
Why Is Socioeconomic Inclusion on Museum Websites Important?
As the world becomes increasingly more digital, it's more important than ever that museums embrace technology to connect with their visitors. If museums want to attract and maintain a steady visitor base, they need to meet those visitors where they are at. And because of its low barrier to entry (it's free to surf the web, and although internet access isn't wholly equitable, access to a wi-fi connection is relatively widespread in the U.S.), the internet is where museums can find these potential visitors today.
But just like in the physical world, museums have plenty of competition online. As life becomes faster-paced and more complicated, people have a plethora of different things demanding their attention and pulling them in all directions--museums need to convince potential visitors that the museum is worth their time. Museum websites that are engaging for people of all socioeconomic levels are, plain and simple, better for museums.
Of course, this point is more from a marketing perspective than anything else, and is only one small part of the picture. Much more importantly, people of all socioeconomic statuses, educational experiences, and literacy levels deserve to feel welcome when navigating museum websites. One needs only to look at the statistics to see just how large and important disadvantaged socioeconomic groups are. According to a 2020 study by Gallup, 54% of people in the U.S. age 16 to 74 read below a sixth-grade level. The same study found a compelling connection between income level and literacy rates, with those at the lowest levels of literacy earning on average $34,000 per year, as compared to those at the minimum proficiency level who average around $63,000. If museums do not take into account people who have low literacy levels or who can't read or write at all, they are not behaving as the public spaces of learning society has come to expect them to be. A truly inclusive, public-serving museum should be able to give you a similar website experience no matter your income, educational attainment, or literacy level.
Author and Editor: Jesse Ludington, 2021
Sources
Bureau, US Census. “Educational Attainment.” Census.Gov, https://www.census.gov/topics/education/educational-attainment.html. Accessed 8 Dec. 2021.
---. “U.S. Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data.” Census.Gov, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/educational-attainment.html. Accessed 6 Dec. 2021.
Communication and the Changing Roles of Public Art Museums : Lessons for Museum Professionals (Book, 2011) [WorldCat.Org]. https://www.worldcat.org/title/communication-and-the-changing-roles-of-public-art-museums-lessons-for-museum-professionals/oclc/1044238377. Accessed 12 Dec. 2021.
Jung, Yuha. The Ignorant Museum: Transforming the Elitist Museum into an Inclusive Learning Place. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283081219_The_ignorant_museum_Transforming_the_elitist_museum_into_an_inclusive_learning_place. 2014.
Nietzel, Michael T. “Low Literacy Levels Among U.S. Adults Could Be Costing The Economy $2.2 Trillion A Year.” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/. Accessed 6 Dec. 2021.
Walsh, David, et al. “Characterising Online Museum Users: A Study of the National Museums Liverpool Museum Website.” International Journal on Digital Libraries, vol. 21, no. 1, Mar. 2020, pp. 75–87, doi:10.1007/s00799-018-0248-8.
Pictures
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