The Evaluation of Museum Multimedia Applications: Lessons from Research

In museums and exhibitions, the use of interactive multimedia applications continues to spread, and now that the technological problems of the early experimental years have largely been solved, curators and educators are focusing more on the audience’s needs and the quality of the interactive experience (Bearman, 1995). Although the museum community is becoming increasingly aware of the need to evaluate multimedia displays (McNamara, 1986; Raphling, 1994; Dierking and Falk, 1998), it is surprising and disappointing that to date very few systematic, in-depth evaluation studies are publicly available. This paper first describes briefly the results obtained from a research study which examined the effectiveness of a multimedia application created for exhibition interpretation; and then, it examines the lessons to be learned from this project and refers to their wider implications for those involved in the design and evaluation of museum multimedia. The study was part of doctoral research carried out at the University of Oxford, funded by a scholarship from the Lambrakis Research Foundation, Athens. It focused on the design and evaluation of a prototype gallery interactive developed for the presentation of an important archaeological site, the classical Greek colony of Euesperides in North Africa. This was a component of the temporary exhibition on the archaeology of Euesperides which was organized by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and shown at the Museum of Oxford in autumn 1995. The Euesperides program combined the fragmented information derived from the excavation of the site—near modern Benghazi in Libya (Vickers et al., 1994)—with the historical background of the city (Economou, 1993), and set out to interpret the objects on display. The project followed all the standard stages of a multimedia production for a museum exhibition: (a) Research on the content of the application; (b) Collection of the material; (c) Multimedia design and programming (Economou, 1995); (d) Formative evaluation; (e) Integration in a museum exhibition; (f) Summative evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Economou, 1996, 1997); (g) Study of the long-term effect on visitors; and (h) Impact on museum staff. More specifically, the areas investigated were: