ABSTRACT
The visitor surveys carried out in the 1950s by David Abbey and Duncan Cameron, at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, are generally acknowledged to be the first systematic visitor surveys undertaken in museums. However, if museums acknowledge that they should be audience-centred, a properly resourced programme of visitor studies should be an essential, systematic element of a museum's activities, with the museum director as a key advocate. The alternative is a view that a visit to a museum or gallery is motivated by an essentially unshareable, individual, personal or social group/family interest. However, the quantitative information they contain can give key insights into the nature of museum audiences and into visitor trends — who the visitors are, where they are coming from, who they are coming with, how they are getting to the site and maybe how often they are coming.
