An Evaluation of Object-Centered Approaches to Interpretation at the British Museum

George Brown Goode, the famed ichthyologist and exhibition administrator at the Smithsonian, once remarked that “an efficient educational museum may be described as a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected specimen” ( Goode, 1901). Such a statement, made in a paper to the American History Organization in 1878, makes the assumption that museum visitors are motivated to visit an educational museum to learn about ideas. Implicit within this concept of the idea-motivated visitor is an imagined sequence of behavior within museum displays: the idea-motivated visitor first reads the label text that delivers the ideas, and then secondly looks at the objects that illustrate these ideas.