Beyond Traditional Museum Practice: Promoting Visitorship through Awareness Making on Contemporary Issues
Adebowale Biodun Areo

Abstract
Despite the dwindling fortunes of museums in Nigeria, arising from reduction in budgets, rising costs of running museums as a non-profit organization, and implementing the performance measures based on consumer satisfaction management, museums have faced increasing pressure to attract wider audiences. This requires a paradigm shift from museums’ pre-occupation with the past, which is centered on acquisition, conservation, storage, research and exhibition of ancient objects in the museums. However, traditional museum practice still has a big place in most museums such that there is a weak liaison with the contemporary societies which museums purport to serve. Reconstructed past is rarely used in seeking solutions to or solving contemporary problems or issues such as environmental problems, diseases, unemployment, kidnapping, etc. This paper primarily looks at research derived from creating awareness on these contemporary issues through experiments in four Nigerian museums. The paper then presents its findings from statistical data of visitors to the museum before and after the awareness creation. These findings are quite revealing and have huge tendency of equipping, as quickly as possible, the museum boards, top management, project managers, curators, exhibitions, and education officers in designing and implementing community-based programmes linked to modern day problems and burning issues.

Full Text: PDF