There are several motivating and satisfying factors that affect volunteer retention. Organizations need to know what these factors are in order to make the volunteer’s role more satisfying and therefore improve rates of retention. The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to explore the motivation factors for volunteers in an art museum setting, in particular the individual motivations for remaining at an organization for a period of time not less than one year, using Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory (Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman, 1959). The research includes an extensive literature review examining motivation theories, factors of retention and volunteering, and aspects of phenomenology. The population of this study consisted of 28 volunteers in one art museum, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum represented an organization with an established and successful volunteer program. The participants were adults who were free-choice volunteers, or volunteers who were not required to provide service for any other reason other than their own choice. Data were collected through an online survey and in-person interviews. A statistical test with a chi-square was used to determine the relationship between volunteer retention and factors of motivation. The following factors were found to be significant in volunteer satisfaction and motivation: engagement and enrichment opportunities, a personal sense of doing something worthwhile, and enjoyment of the work itself. Of those factors, it was found that engagement and enrichment opportunities had the highest impact on volunteer retention. It was concluded that (1) there are several motivation factors for volunteers; (2) there is one motivation factor that also has a significant relationship with volunteer retention; and (3) volunteer motivation factors can also serve as factors for dissatisfaction and negatively impact retention. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / February 18, 2019. / Administration, Art, Motivation, Museum, Retention, Volunteer / Includes bibliographical references. / Pat Villeneuve, Professor Directing Dissertation; Stacey Rutledge, University Representative; Jeff Broome, Committee Member; Ann Rowson Love, Committee Member.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. / It is the intention of this Doctor of Creative Arts to convey the complexity of viewing art in museums. Concentrating on both the physical and cultural contexts of art, I focus specifically on Italian museums that house artworks of the Renaissance. I argue that the viewing experience in these museums is formed at the intersection of cultures, histories, the past and the present, art and the subjectivity of the viewer's own gaze. In this project the personal, physical, cerebral, sensorial and temporal experiences of art are central to my concerns. The structure of this DCA combines my photographic art practice with this written reflection. I work with both the visual and the textual to most appropriately and effectively express my concerns with the Renaissance and Italian museums. In a peculiar act of doubling, I am making art about the experience of viewing it, and through image-making I am able both to explore and to comment more profoundly on the experience of these museums. While my research and writing at times responds to these images, it also inspires them. Here I integrate the past, history and art, with contemporary theories that are relevant in the study ofvision and today's art viewing, and rely on numerous writers across the broad .fields of visual arts, art history and theory, museology, historiography and cultural tourism. In surveying these extensive interwoven disciplines I engage with the magnitude of the social, historical and theoretical studies that converge in the museum viewer's field of vision. Beyond the glorious artworks themselves Italian Renaissance museums exhibit a dense visual and historic culture that provides an enriched viewing environment. They paradoxically intersect 'high' art with a phenomenal popularity that appears ever-expanding through endless reproductions and representations via modern technologies. Through examining these museums with their multiple histories and contexts I hope to argue for a slower, more considered engagement with art, that encourages the viewer to experience the sensual as well as the intellectual aspects that this opulent environment offers.

Internationally, museums have increasingly come under review since Bourdieu's (1969) research focused on art gallery visiting patterns and cultural codes. Museums exist within a post-modern milieu that demands a more democratic approach to defining their cultural and educational role within society. Over the last decade in particular, art museums, criticised for being elitist and insular within their communities, have been challenged to be more inclusive, accessible and relevant to their local communities.The literature suggests that a review of the core mission and the culture of museums is required to provide the catalyst for change. However, there is little evidence or few models offered as to how such re-visioning could be implemented. New Zealand art museums have been slow in responding to the issues, or to conducting research involving either their visitors or their communities. These emergent issues provided the context for this study, which is focused on the creation and reception of a community based exhibition within a contemporary regional art museum.This exhibition project brought together community participants and established artists, and the study evaluates the responses of the exhibition creators and the exhibition audience. In line with action research methodology, evaluation surveys and observational data were collected during the distinct phases of the project and resulted in a number of findings that have implications for regional art museums.The findings from this present study indicate that curators working alongside the community with an action research methodology, while developing exhibition projects, can produce positive outcomes for the participants, the audience and the museum. Creative partnerships can be established that enhance life-long-learning opportunities and contribute to the relevance of museums within their communities.The present study also proposes that museums re-vision their mission to become 'learning organisations' (Senge, 1994, 2000) and provides a model that could be appropriate for museums intent on enriching their organisational culture and enhancing their significance and profile within their community.

Museum techniques of presentation are reviewed for the possibility of use in contemporary botanic gardens. Supporting evidence suggests that these techniques are being successfully applied in some botanic gardens around the world. Institutions that have adopted museum techniques have been found to operate efficiently, whilst providing increased levels of enjoyment and education for visitors. Cultural differences between various countries have small influences on the most effective presentation techniques used, but further local research is required to uncover visitor preferences and use patterns in Australian botanic gardens. General principles of design that work well in the indoor environments of international musuems apply well in the outdoor environments of botanic gardens. Therefore greater use should be made of existing international museum research into visitor patterns of behaviour where it is locally appropriate.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. / It is the intention of this Doctor of Creative Arts to convey the complexity of viewing art in museums. Concentrating on both the physical and cultural contexts of art, I focus specifically on Italian museums that house artworks of the Renaissance. I argue that the viewing experience in these museums is formed at the intersection of cultures, histories, the past and the present, art and the subjectivity of the viewer's own gaze. In this project the personal, physical, cerebral, sensorial and temporal experiences of art are central to my concerns. The structure of this DCA combines my photographic art practice with this written reflection. I work with both the visual and the textual to most appropriately and effectively express my concerns with the Renaissance and Italian museums. In a peculiar act of doubling, I am making art about the experience of viewing it, and through image-making I am able both to explore and to comment more profoundly on the experience of these museums. While my research and writing at times responds to these images, it also inspires them. Here I integrate the past, history and art, with contemporary theories that are relevant in the study ofvision and today's art viewing, and rely on numerous writers across the broad .fields of visual arts, art history and theory, museology, historiography and cultural tourism. In surveying these extensive interwoven disciplines I engage with the magnitude of the social, historical and theoretical studies that converge in the museum viewer's field of vision. Beyond the glorious artworks themselves Italian Renaissance museums exhibit a dense visual and historic culture that provides an enriched viewing environment. They paradoxically intersect 'high' art with a phenomenal popularity that appears ever-expanding through endless reproductions and representations via modern technologies. Through examining these museums with their multiple histories and contexts I hope to argue for a slower, more considered engagement with art, that encourages the viewer to experience the sensual as well as the intellectual aspects that this opulent environment offers.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: James E. Swasey, Dept. of Plant & Soil Sciences. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis explores how religion is being represented, interpreted, and discussed in Canadian museums. It draws from a sample of thirty-one semi-structured interviews with curators and museum professionals and from the author’s own observations of fifty-one museums in eleven provinces and territories across Canada to explore the themes of space, power, and identity as they relate to religion in Canadian museums. Using the theories of sacred space created by Knott, this thesis explores how Canadian museums are capable of becoming sacred spaces based on their ability to give visitors numinous experiences, to act as contested spaces, and to serve as a location of religion. Canadian museums are powerful, as argued by Bourdieu and Foucault, by their very nature as places that produce and define knowledge, through claims to objectivity and an emphasis on a progress narrative, giving museums (and curators) power to define what is and is not religious by deciding whether and how to discuss the religious aspects of an artefact, object, or culture. Within the context of these two themes, museums enact Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity by telling stories about different groups in order to create and communicate their identities. Some museums present a homogenous Canadian identity based on white mainline Christian identity while others explore the complexity of Canadian identity by telling the stories of non-mainstream religious or ethnic groups and their participation in Canadian history. Aboriginal peoples in Canada have become involved in the display of their traditions in larger museums and have started creating their own museums and cultural centres where their voices can take precedence.

This thesis is a study of the changing model of the local history museum in Ontario, Canada and the consequential changing interpretations of the past in these institutions. <br /><br /> Beginning in 1879, local history museums in Ontario developed largely from the energies of local historical societies bent on collecting the past. While science museums used taxonomy and classification to mirror the natural state of the world, history museums had no equivalent framework for organizing collections as real-world referents. Often organized without apparent design, by the early 20th century a deductive method was used to categorize and display history collections into functional groups based on manufacture and use. <br /><br /> By the mid-twentieth century an inductive approach for interpreting collections in exhibits was promoted to make these objects more meaningful and interesting to museum visitors, and to justify their collection. This approach relied on the recontextualization of the object through two methods: text-based, narrative exhibits; and verisimilitude, the recreation of the historical environment in which the artifact would have been originally used. These exhibit practices became part of the syllabus of history museum work as it professionalized during the mid-twentieth century, almost a full century after the science museum. In Ontario, recontextualizing artifacts eventually dominated the process of recreating the past at museums. Objects were consigned to placement within textual storylines in order to impart accurate meaning. At its most elaborate, artifacts were recontextualized into houses, and buildings into villages, wherein the public could fully immerse themselves in a tableau of the past. Throughout this process, the dynamic of recontextualization to enhance visitor experience subtlety shifted the historical artifact from its previous position in the museum as an autonomous relic of the past, to one subordinate to context. <br /><br /> Although presented as absolute, the narratives and reconstructions formed by these collecting and exhibiting practices were contingent on a multitude of shifting factors, such as accepted museum practice, physical, economic and human resources available to the museum operation, and prevailing beliefs about the past and community identity. This thesis exposes the wider field of museum practice in Ontario community history museums over a century while the case study of Doon Pioneer Village shows in detail the conditional qualities of historical reconstruction in museum exhibits and historical restoration.

In 1999, the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized that there was a need for a better public understanding of science. For the public to have better accessibility and comprehension of China's significance to the world, the Computer Network Information Center (CNIC), under the direction of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, combined resources from thousands of experts across the world to develop online science exhibits housed within the Virtual Science Museum of China. Through an analysis of historical documents, this descriptive dissertation presents a research project that explores a dimension of the development of the Giant Panda Exhibit. This study takes the reader on a journey, first to China and then to a classroom within the United States, in order to answer the following questions: (1) What is the process of the development of a virtual science exhibit; and, (2) What role do public audiences play in the design and implementation of virtual science museums? The creation of a virtual science museum exhibition is a process that is not completed with just the building and design, but must incorporate feedback from public audiences who utilize the exhibit. To meet the needs of the museum visitors, the designers at CNIC took a user-centered approach and solicited feedback from six survey groups. To design a museum that would facilitate a cultural exchange of scientific information, the CNIC looked at the following categories: visitor insights, the usability of the technology, the educational effectiveness of the museum exhibit, and the cultural nuances that existed between students in China and in the United States. The findings of this study illustrate that the objectives of museum designers may not necessarily reflect the needs of the visitors and confirm previous research studies which indicate that museum exhibits need a more constructivist approach that fully engages the visitor in an interactive, media-rich environment. Even though the world has moved forwards with digital technology, classroom instruction in both China and in the United States continues to reflect traditional teaching methods. Students were shown to have a lack of experience with the Internet in classrooms and difficulty in scientific comprehension when using the virtual science museum--showing a separation between classroom technology and learning. Students showed a greater interest level in learning science with technology through online gaming and rich multimedia suggesting that virtual science museums can be educationally valuable and support an alternative to traditional teaching methods if designed with the end user in mind.

Research on constraints to leisure and recreation participation has focused on various types of activities in which people would like to participate, are currently participating, or have stopped participating. However, little attention has been made to identify constraints associated with art activities participation. The objectives of this study were to 1) identify factors which limit people's attendance to art museums/galleries; 2) address the issue of the internal heterogeneity between two constrained leisure behaviors; 3) reveal the role of previous participation, interest in future participation, gender and lifecycle in the perception of constraints to art activities; and 4) show the validity of segmentation criteria which are previous participation, interest in future participation, gender and lifecycle. Data from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA 1997) was used in this study. Total sample was divided into four categories by previous participation and interest in future participation. Further, the categories 'participants with interest' and 'non-participants with interest' were sub-divided based on gender and lifecycle. The results revealed that time, cost, access and availability were considered as the most significant constraints to art activity participation across all segments. However, the array and intensity of constraints differed depending on the types of constrained leisure. In addition, different types of constraints were experienced with different intensity by segments defined by previous participation, interest in future participation, gender and lifecycle. The analyses demonstrated that previous participation, interest in future participation, gender and lifecycle were important segmentation criteria in constructing homogeneous groups with respect to perceived leisure constraints.