ABSTRACT
There has been a dramatic growth in the size of the museum audience over the last century (Lusaka & Strand, 1998). Consider the following data: fifty years ago, two in ten people went to museums regularly. By the end of the twentieth century, three out of every five people visited some kind of museum at least once a year (Falk, 1998). These statistics do not include visitors to museum Web sites, which major museums report outnumber visitors to physical museums at least three to one. This dramatic increase in visitorship can be explained, in part, by the growth of new museums and the changes in the quality of exhibits and programming in existing museums. The creation of new museums and improved exhibits and programming alone, however, does not fully account for this increase in visitorship. Research indicates that a large part of this shift can be attributed to changes in the larger society, where free-choice learning experiences, such as visiting museums, are becoming important parts of everyday life (Falk & Dierking, 2000).
