Meeting Visitors' Expectations - The Perceived Degree of Museumness

Defining a physical or virtual space as a museum, seems to have clear implications on visitors’ behaviour and particularly learning behaviour. Past research shows that it is essential to identify different museum types and consider their similarities, differences and special features in order to be able to make valid research hypotheses. However, visitors would not always define certain types of museums as museums. Therefore, we wished to study how visitors view the different museum types and their main reasons for visiting different museums. Investigating visitors’ different definitions and expectations, we used questionnaires which were also used to produce a scale of museumness, the degree to which a certain museum type fits visitors’ museum stereotypes. The analysis of the data allowed the creation of a list of guidelines for the development of educational technology for museum use.