Leading Innovation at Kelvingrove

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September 26, 2009
LEADING INNOVATION AT KELVINGROVE (A)
Mark O’Neill, director of Glasgow Museums, was reviewing the latest visitation figures
for Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. After a three-year closure for renovation of the
historic Victorian building and reinstallation of exhibits using an innovative, story-based
approach, the museum had reopened in July 2006. By June 2007, it had surpassed Edinburgh
Castle as Scotland’s most popular tourist destination.
Queen Elizabeth II, who had presided at the reopening ceremony, commented, “I am
confident that this restoration will not only preserve a degree of familiarity for those innumerable
Glaswegians with long and happy memories of this place as it was, but also, in its splendid new
state, fascinate and educate old and new visitors for many generations to come.” O’Neill thought
back to the beginning of the process and concerns that the new approach would tamper with what
generations of visitors had loved: “Kelvingrove got a million visits a year before we closed.
There was a lot of anxiety that we would destroy what people valued.”
Previous innovation efforts in the museum community in Glasgow had been

controversial, creating wariness about undertaking a major redesign at the beloved Kelvingrove.
O’Neill’s response to these concerns was to shift away from the idea of radical innovation for its
own sake, working instead through a process of public consultation and experimentation aimed
at “taking the best of what was there and adding in some new things,” as he described it. “Just
making things work a bit better. Work in the way that they’re supposed to. If museums are meant
to give people inspiring experiences, let’s think about inspiring for a while. What would that
actually mean? What about asking people what inspires them? How much of that can be done in
museums?”
Kelvingrove
Opened in 1901, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was the largest of Glasgow’s
major museums, all of which operated under the umbrella of Glasgow Museums, the largest
municipal museum service in Britain. Even before the (British pounds) GBP30 million
This case was written by Jeanne M. Liedtka, Associate Professor of Business Administration, and Randy Salzman,
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refurbishment, Kelvingrove was the most visited museum in the United Kingdom outside
London. Opened to express the pride, wealth, and cultural ambitions of one of the Victorian era’s
great industrial and trading cities, Kelvingrove, like most museums of the era, sought to
encompass the entire world of art, history, archaeology, and natural history in its collection.
Located in a historic park adjacent to Glasgow University, the museum contained, among its
more than 4,000 exhibited objects, Italian and Dutch masterworks, French impressionist and
postimpressionist paintings, artifacts from the excavations of ancient Egypt, and an arms and
armor exhibit second only to Britain’s Royal Armories in quality and range. By the late 1980s,
however, Kelvingrove’s traditional museum structure was seen by some, including the museum’s
new director, Julian Spalding, as losing relevance with modern audiences. Intending to create
more interdisciplinary displays, Spalding replaced the museum’s traditional curatorial
departments with three sections—Art, Science, and History—designed to act as perspectives on
the entire museum collection. Another revealing change was the abolition of the tradition by
which staff had to request permission from senior curators (known as “keepers”) to view reserve
collections outside their own discipline. Instead, the collection was to be treated as a single entity
that all staff could view. Spalding also sought out new staff that he saw as innovative thinkers,
like Mark O’Neill.
O’Neill Arrives at Kelvingrove
Within a month of joining Kelvingrove as director of Social History in August 1990,

O’Neill was asked by Spalding to begin thinking about innovation across the museum as a
whole. O’Neill recruited a cross-disciplinary group to think about how to approach the larger
museum. He recalled, “Even though I was in the specialist history department, I was the new boy
so I was given this.… Julian was a great innovator, almost to an extreme. He sort of committed
us to innovation for its own sake and alienated a lot of traditional visitors.” Spalding’s appetite
for the controversial was well known. “If controversy were an art form, Julian Spalding would
surely be its Leonardo,” a local art critic commented.1
O’Neill developed an ability to work new ideas through the organization in a process he
described as “maze behavior”: “Julian was interested in radical innovation, and I learned a lot
from trying to make his ideas work, both in the sense of providing a rationale for them and of
enlisting the cooperation of staff in delivering them. I found ways of getting the bureaucracy to
deliver using maze behavior. Rats don’t work out how to get through the maze—they just try all
the avenues until one works.”
O’Neill brought a multifaceted background to his new role. He explained his rationale in
pursuing a career in museums:
1
Alan Taylor, “The Art of Making Enemies,” Sunday Herald, March 31, 2002.
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I came late to museums. At college, I studied English literature and European

history at Cork University and lived at home. That was part of the culture in
Ireland—you lived with your mammy and went to university. After graduation, I
worked in publishing, teaching history in school and university, and teaching
English as a foreign language in Italy. In 1983, I lost my job at a magazine
publishing company. There were three jobs advertised that summer in museums,
and I applied for them all and didn’t get anywhere because I had no experience. It
had never occurred to me before that anybody worked in museums. The museums
in Ireland then didn’t look like anybody worked in them. And I thought it would
be better to be an unemployed curator than just unemployed.
Taking advantage of a back-to-work scheme for the unemployed in arts administration,

O’Neill found a three-month internship in a museum in Ulster and then worked for 18 months for
a community museum in Tipperary, which was funded by something akin to a welfare-to-work
program. He left there to do a postgrad in museum studies at Leicester University. After
graduation, in 1985, he was offered a position setting up a small community museum in
Springburn, one of the poorest sections of Glasgow. “I suppose not many people were interested
in working in a slum, so I got a job creating a new museum as my first job,” he said. “That
certainly thrust leadership on me, but also meant that I had a freedom to experiment that most
people wouldn’t get until much later in their career.”
Although O’Neill felt uncomfortable with talk of leadership, his accomplishments at

Springburn drew accolades from throughout the United Kingdom. “I’m quite self-conscious
about thinking of myself as a leader, which might be a cultural thing. In the culture I come from,
‘not bad’ is the highest praise there is.”
Developing Springburn
Springburn was a neighborhood of 40,000 on the northern outskirts of Glasgow. Once the
biggest center of locomotive manufacturing in the world, it had fallen on hard times. Many of its
Victorian buildings had been demolished, one in four families was a single-parent household,
and another one in four was an older person living alone. Drugs and crime were rampant. “It’s
pretty amazing that they thought a museum would do some good,” O’Neill reflected as he looked
back at the impetus behind the museum’s founding.
With some background reading on the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum of Black

History as a kind of guide—“everything else was improvised,” O’Neill said—he began
experimenting with merging the treatment of historical subjects with pressing contemporary
issues. He took inspiration from the world of therapy:
At that time, I was reading a lot about therapeutic approaches to loss and about
how communities recover from loss—like after a major disaster. I guess I had a
consciously therapeutic model of remembering and recovering from the past—
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always with the purpose of creating meaning in the present.… One of the things I
always worried about in dealing with a community that has experienced such an
amazing amount of loss is that it’s very easy to communicate that meaning only
exists in the past. And now there’s nothing. It’s very easy to communicate quite a
negative message—an untrue one because the past was pretty horrible and there
are some opportunities in the present.
In working with the museum’s local management committee, O’Neill’s strategy was to
give them “everything that they asked for in terms of nostalgia and reminiscence and then add in
what I thought was necessary. I avoided any conflict between their fairly nostalgic agenda and
my more sort of issue-based approach.… Doing a museum on the standard model seemed to me
to be a missed opportunity.” Rather than doing the history of locomotive building, for example,
the staff created an exhibition on the history of work. “It covered all the important history, but it
came right up to date and engaged with unemployment and training and what work meant where
so many were unemployed,” O’Neill explained.
From there, Springburn moved into a series of exhibitions by and about present-day
neighborhood groups—mothers, teenagers, 8- to 12-year-olds—using art and information from
the groups themselves “to engage with history insofar as those groups wanted to engage with
history. Very quickly the museum became sort of a mirror of real life in the community.”
Reflecting back on these early experiences at Springburn, O’Neill saw the seeds of what
would become the core of his approach later at Kelvingrove: “The theme of my leadership in
museums is drawing out the contemporary relevance. It’s not making things relevant that are not
relevant, but engaging with the history of those amazing continuities and disruptions and making
those more explicit and bringing them up to date.”
By the time O’Neill left to join Kelvingrove, in 1990, Springburn had developed a
reputation as a successful model for community museums in Great Britain.
Kelvingrove and the Storytelling Approach
Early in his directorship at Kelvingrove, Spalding had become interested in the idea of
stories as an organizing theme. It became O’Neill’s project to move the concept forward with the
curatorial staff. Initially, this proved to be a challenge, as O’Neill explained:
Not only didn’t they “get” it; they had been trained never to think of stories. A
story has all sorts of connotations of being for children, of oversimplifying. The
phrase “dumb down” hadn’t been invented yet, but you could see it coming. They
were trained to summarize their disciplines, to reflect the latest thinking, and to
try to distill that—rather than focusing on one thread that makes a story.
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By “story,” we meant something that you could tell through objects that was
about an important meaning in the objects. We weren’t trying to summarize
disciplines, but to find a language of objects that would make a point, ideally
across traditional categories. Thus, in the museum collection, we have paintings,
within art history, and rock samples, within geology. The geology curator
suggested a display about how the landscapes we see in Scotland are shaped by
the underlying rock formations—a story we can tell using museum objects. By
using stories, we’re trying to tap into the mythic psychology of fictional
storytelling, but relating it to nonfictional histories of objects. Every object has
dozens of attributes and dozens of aspects that you could tell people about. But
we select the one that’s most likely to trigger contemporary people’s interests.
Our mantra was “the most interesting stories about the most interesting objects.”
That meant that we weren’t trying to compete with the national museum and tell
the whole story of Scottish archeology from 8000 BC to 1400. We were just
saying, “What objects have we got, and what are the most interesting of them?”
We have great Bronze Age burial goods, so there’s a story about how they buried
people in the Bronze Age. But we don’t explain everything else about the Bronze
Age; we only explain about how they buried people. But turn your back and these
expert staff would automatically start trying to tell the whole story of the Bronze
Age. The epistemology of Kelvingrove is that the displays are accurate and true,
but they’re not the final truth or the whole truth.
The progress of storytelling at Kelvingrove took a back seat with O’Neill’s involvement
in the development of the new St. Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art, which opened in
1993. The published mission of St. Mungo’s was to “promote mutual understanding and mutual
respect among people of all faiths and none.” It explored religion as the greatest inspiration of art
over the millennia, and examined the six major world religions and the place of Christianity in
Scottish life.
Although it created significant controversy when it opened, St. Mungo’s offered a chance
to experiment with thematic, interdisciplinary design, and encouraged O’Neill and Spalding to
return to exploring stories as Kelvingrove’s organizing theme. O’Neill described his approach to
winning the curatorial staff over:
What we did was to ask all the curators to come up with ideas for stories and we
limited them to a maximum of 15 objects, which was extremely painful for lots
of them because, again, their training is about comprehensiveness. If you’ve only
15 objects, you can’t be comprehensive—you have to select. We also put a
premium on interdisciplinary stories. And then we found some money and gave
small sums of money to individuals or pairs of people who could try out some of
the more innovative ideas that were suggested. There were lots of briefing
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meetings. There was a team that had someone from each section who would go
back and try and sell it.
O’Neill employed another interesting technique—he led the change through the use of
forms:
People working in bureaucracies—and museums are classic bureaucracies—

respond to forms. So you give them a form—“This is the story format, this is the
brief, and this is the form in which you propose your story.” And from that, we
then began to develop and refine a process that says, “What’s the story? What’s
the key message of the story? Who is it for? What are your key objects?” And so
we had a basis for sending the forms back. We basically worked with the
structure, and the forms were evaluated and sent back and we asked curators to
tighten up their objectives or say, “This isn’t a story; this is just a list of objects,”
and there was a lot of debate and discussion. [See Exhibit 1 for an interpretation
plan template.]
In any change or innovation process, people can obstruct or even sabotage new
developments, but most people will feel they have to make some effort to comply
with an instruction to fill in a form related to their discipline—occasionally even
close to the deadline. Even if they object to the approach or even to the entire
project, the filled-in form gives you a basis for engagement, for development of
the idea. Kelvingrove was shaped by a huge amount of public consultation, but
the stories, with only one exception, were suggested by the staff. The exception
was about Mary Queen of Scots, for which there was huge popular demand, and
which we found a way of doing, even though we didn’t have strong relevant
collections.
The early story suggested by the geology curator about Scottish landscape “survived all
the process of filtering,” O’Neill observed, “and the finished product is part of our display now.
It was one of the ones we did an early pilot of to see what it would look like.”
Finding Funding
The real catalyst for taking seriously the idea of stories came when the possibility of
funding became real. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) was established by the U.K. government
in 1994 as a way, in O’Neill’s words, of “investing in the country’s crumbling infrastructure of
museums and historic buildings. Without a major HLF grant (and the confidence its endorsement
would give other funders) there was no hope of raising the funds for the Kelvingrove project.”
Between 1994, when Kelvingrove started working on the storytelling concept in earnest,
and 1996, when the museum submitted its HLF application, curators had become engaged,
producing 200 stories that became the foundation for the grant application.
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The objectives of the Kelvingrove redisplay application were as follows:
x To create an object-based, storytelling, flexible museum that shared the wonders of the
collection with as wide a range of local people and visitors as possible
x To integrate 21st-century museum displays in ways that respected the building
x To restore the architecture to its Victorian condition, removing internal accretions and
creating better access to and throughout the building
Dealing with Rejection
O’Neill described the rejection of the bid, in June 1997, as “a low point for the
museum.… It was really, really traumatic.” He said:
The shock of rejection led us to review every aspect of the plan, taking a more
systematic view of many changes that had been developed in an intuitive way. As
part of the recovery, one of the most useful exercises we undertook was to try to
define what the museum meant in 1901 and what it would mean when it reopened
in the 21st century:
19th Century 21st Century

One definition of culture Many definitions of culture
Communication in lecture mode Communication in dialogic mode
Subject-centered Visitor-centered
Taxonomic structure Story-based
Comprehensive Selective, based on strengths of collection
Object-based Object-based
Public education Public education
It was clear that there were vast changes in the wider society and culture in which
the museum was to function, with a strong continuity in the commitment to
object-based public education, but it was clear that we hadn’t followed through on
the whole range of differences, most notably in terms of dialogue with
stakeholders and consultation with visitors and nonvisitors. The modern museum
has to compete for the visitor’s time far beyond anything early-20th-century
curators could imagine.
As they geared up for a second try, four major outreach advisory boards (disability,
junior, community, and education) were created. O’Neill described the other research efforts that
were pursued:
We did general clipboard surveys: “What would you like to see in the museum?”
We did focus groups where we generated words about museums that people
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associate with museums or would like to associate with museums. What we got
back was thought provoking and challenging. It gave us a license to do really
difficult stories like violence against women or the history of sectarianism in
Glasgow—not what you would expect in the most prestigious art venue in the
city.… We tested the titles of the gallery. If we were unsure about anything, we
tested it out on whoever was relevant.… So, while it was led by the curators—
their ideas are what we work with—the ideas were tested and filtered on the basis
of what the public was interested in.
Through consultation with the public, the number of stories was reduced, from 200 to
100, for the second grant application. The staff’s perspective on the role that stories played also
deepened in the course of these conversations, as O’Neill observed:
We came to see storytelling as a way of moving beyond a view of museum

communication as a cognitive process (no matter how sophisticated), but as a way
of using objects to stimulate visitors to open themselves to beauty, to imagine the
past, to think about issues, to empathize with people who are different from them
culturally or in terms of ability or disability, ethnicity, or gender. Most staff came
to see visitor consultation not as an infringement of their professional territory or
even as a constraint, but as an essential, energizing part of the creative dynamic.
A major change in the second proposal was to replace the alphabetical arrangement of
stories in the first proposal with one based on common-sense thematic groupings. Finding a
logical structure was not easy, as O’Neill recalled:
We spent about two years working on it—every kind of sophisticated and poetic
structure that you could imagine. In the end, I organized a staff meeting and wrote
out the names of all the stories on pieces of paper and gave them to people and
said, “Put the ones that look like they go together. If it’s anything other than
commonsensical, it won’t mean anything to the public.” So we just grouped them
in things that go together. Obviously, some stories could go one way or another,
but that actually didn’t matter. So we just bunched them, six or eight to a gallery.
We have 22 galleries, 100 stories. So the average is whatever it is, you know, 4.5
stories per gallery. And the final display looked very close to what came out at
that meeting. And that was the key for being able to just sell the project as a
coherent structure because the alphabetical list just really put people off, like we
really didn’t know what we were doing.
The second Heritage Lottery Fund bid, submitted in early 1998, was successful. It funded
a development period of about a year. A final grant of GBP12.8 million was awarded in February
2000, the largest grant to a museum in Scotland up to that time. It covered just under 50% of the
total cost, with the remainder contributed by the City of Glasgow. This amount was raised
through the creation of a separate fundraising charity, a major innovation in the United Kingdom
for a local authority museum service.
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Building a Leadership Team at Kelvingrove
During much of the 1990s, Kelvingrove had suffered from almost continuous
restructuring. In the three years before O’Neill became director, in 1998, three separate local
government funding crises led to the loss of one-third of the museum’s budget and staff, leaving
morale low. O’Neill recalled, “I had been sort of holding the museum together for about two and
a half years, not so much on my own, but with a management team who knew that they were
going to be restructured. And there were vacancies and we couldn’t fill them. So I was driving it
forward in a very kind of solitary way.”
Eventually, O’Neill was able to recruit a new senior team. In filling these roles, he sought
analytical minds, people who shared the value of museum access, and staffers who filled in the
voids in his own abilities: “All of them are much better organized than I am. They’re seriously
rigorous and well-organized people. They’re all people who deliver and never have to be
reminded. They always do things that we’ve agreed to do. And they all take responsibility. They
are all quite assertive. If they don’t think that we should be doing something or they think I’m
wrong, they feel ridiculously free to tell me.”
In looking for people who had an “almost masochistic endurance,” O’Neill’s belief in the
value of persistence was obvious: “If something doesn’t work, try a different way and keep
trying different ways until you find something that works. And find people who will deliver. All
organizations have two structures; one is the formal one and one is the list of people who deliver.
You can go through a lot of people who don’t deliver before you find the one who does. And
then you have to support them and protect them from the cynics.”
Yet, after recruiting his capable new staff, O’Neill found it difficult to change his own
approach: “I was the ideas person, and I knew how to get things done. And when these people
were appointed, I found it really difficult to let go and I also found it really difficult to delegate
and to leave any space for them.” When he learned to delegate, his own focus changed: “What I
do now is constantly look to the future and try to maintain the organization as open as possible,
so that it doesn’t form overly rigid boundaries based on what we need to do today. In terms of
day-to-day working, I discuss with my colleagues how I can best help, what I, because of my
position in the organization, am best placed to do. This is often about removing obstacles and
securing resources.”
Evaluation in the Museum Setting
Evaluation, in O’Neill’s view, was a vital element in the change at Kelvingrove. The
most powerful form of evaluation, for him, occurred at the front end: “Work out how to do it
before you spend all the money on getting it wrong and it’s too late to fix it,” he advised. The
front-end evaluation conducted for the second HLF application—in particular, the extensive
consultation with the public—drove the success of implementation.
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O’Neill noted, “People always react about how difficult it is to do evaluation. But when
we started, we had practically no money … some of the evaluation doesn’t cost anything. You
can ask patrons from the local community center to come down, look at your museum, and give
them a cup of tea and say, ‘What do you think?’”
Especially surprising to O’Neill was the perceptiveness of the focus groups they worked
with:
They were brilliant at saying not only what they didn’t like, but what they wanted.
And they talked about things like they wanted to know the “real meaning” of the
objects. And by which they meant, you know, the human interest or its link with
life as opposed to technical jargon or naming-of-parts kind of labels.… And they
talked about the sequences and they wanted the connection between the stories. I
think it was partly the intelligence of the person leading the focus groups that
managed to elicit that. A museum person would have led it far too much, and a lot
of marketing people wouldn’t have got the museum issues enough to have [asked]
the right questions.
Innovating in the Museum World
With the changes at Kelvingrove as a backdrop, O’Neill reflected on what he saw as the
confusion surrounding innovation in the museum field:
I often think that it’s not creativity but a kind of literal-mindedness that leads to
major innovations. The museum of religion came about because we were asked to
provide a function for a building next to the medieval cathedral and a Victorian
graveyard. Various suggestions were made—a gallery of medieval (Christian) art,
for example—but the most relevant and powerful theme suggested by the site was
religion. This did require looking at the collection in terms of its human meanings
rather than its disciplinary categories. I did get an e-mail from a colleague who
said it was a “ghastly idea” bringing all these objects “that had nothing to do with
each other”—but this was an exception. Once the concept was articulated, it
seemed really obvious.
He worried about the dampening effects of early acculturation into the museum field:
I think a lot of people don’t see ideas because they don’t feel they can initiate and
carry out things outside their own area of comfort and expertise. People who have
been acculturated into museums early in their career often don’t have that sense
that they can modify what seems to them the basic framework. You find quite
often that they don’t know the history of museums. They have no sense of how
fluid and varied museums have been in the past. Loads of innovation happened in
the 19th century, when they were making up what museums could be. And then
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they were taken over by the establishment.… Who is the museum for? If it’s for
them, you have to know what they like and what they want. Museums are very
happy to have an education section that’s separate from the curatorial section. In
most big institutions—even ones with very big education departments like the
British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum or the Met—the education
people are given the product by the curators—“This is the exhibition. Now make
it accessible to the children”—as opposed to planning it together.… Planning it
together requires an intellectual rationale of the vision.
Even if you take a really traditional definition of museums—museums are places

that research, collect, preserve, and display objects for the benefit of the public—
the depth comes from asking again and again whether we are actually doing what
we say we are doing. What are the implications of the simple fact that we are
open to the public? What does that mean? We tell our funders that we are a public
good, and that they should spend money on us. What is that good? How does that
good get done? Can it be done better?
And when we answer that question—whether it’s a sense of beauty or

inspiration—then the comeback is, “How can we make that experience more
available to more people? How can we make it better for people?” For example,
with the Museum of World Religions, we worked hard at understanding the
visitor experience. Art museums, from the Louvre onwards, were created with a
strong secular, indeed, antireligious agenda, yet many people find a quasi-spiritual
solace in art. What could we do in a museum of religion, at the very least, not to
preclude people from having a spiritual response? Since 9/11, many museums
have taken to showing religious objects, but they haven’t worked through the
changes required to the traditional museum aesthetic to enable this possibility.
Thus, the museum (which remains a secular institution) can function both as an
art and cultural historical museum and as a centre for spiritual experience,
depending on what the visitors bring with them.
I think a lot of people confuse good ideas with creativity. Anything we’ve done
that’s innovative belongs far more to digging deep to understand what we’re
trying to do and how we can do it better than it does to “creativity.”
I don’t think there’s any shortage of ideas. You can get any three people who
work in an organization, lock them in a room for two hours, and they’ll come up
with a list of dozens of things that could be done. And some of them will be really
innovative and creative; some of them will be traditional and dull. But what’s
really important is doing programs or projects that deliver on the deep
understanding of the vision. It doesn’t matter whether they’re innovative or
traditional, so long as they’re delivering.
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I think, almost by definition, if you develop a deep understanding of the impact

you’re trying to make, it will produce innovation. But innovation is secondary.
Telling people to do “innovation that’s radically new and different”—that’s
intimidating, to come up with something you’ve never thought of before. How
can people come up with something they’ve never thought of before?
People can come up with something they’ve never thought of before, but not
because they are directed to do so. They need to be led through a process, a
process that returns to basic principles and works forward again, exploring those
ideals in terms of contemporary purposes, audiences, and understandings, to bring
out new possibilities.
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Exhibit 1
LEADING INNOVATION AT KELVINGROVE (A)
Interpretation Plan Template
DISPLAY DELIVERY TEAM:
GALLERY:
GALLERY CO-ORDINATOR:
GALLERY THEME:
STORY DISPLAY TITLE:
CURATOR:
KEY OBJECTS ON WHICH THIS STORY DISPLAY IS BASED
WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY ABOUT?
If the visitor remembers only one thing about your Story Display what do you want it to be? (Key concept)
WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?
Who are your target audiences?

Why do you think the visitors you are targeting will be interested in what you have to say?
What understanding or perceptions do you think they have of the subject?
What links are there to the 5-14 curriculum (if primary school pupils are a target audience)?
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY?
Key messages:
1.
2.
3.
WHY?
What do you want the visitor to learn from your display? (Learning Objectives)
How do you want your visitors to feel when they are engaging with your display? (Emotional Objectives)
What do you want your visitors to do after they have seen your display? (Behavioural Objectives)
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Exhibit 1 (continued)
WHAT WILL BE THE VISITOR EXPERIENCE?
Is this a multi-sensory display?

If so, how might you encourage visitors to use sight, hearing, smell, touch, or taste?
Do you want to encourage inspection/ investigation?
If so, how can you provoke them to look more closely?
Do you want to relate to what is known to your visitors?
If so, can you compare or contrast your message to ideas and experiences that are familiar or important to your
visitors?
Do you want to tap into your visitors’ emotions?
If so, how can you best convey the emotion that is inherent in your message?
Do you want your visitors to be actively involved?
If so, what kind of interactives would you use?
WHAT MEDIA DO YOU ENVISAGE USING TO TELL YOUR STORY?
Detail any you of the following you would like to use and prioritise these as:
1 Essential to the interpretation
2 An effective way to engage the identified audiences
3 Desirable if budget allows
x additional objects (supporting a multidisciplinary approach)
x contextual images
x label texts
x lighting effects
x audio visual programme
x computer interactive
x model / props
x diorama
x replicas and reconstructions
x audio
x handling materials
x manual interactive
x leaflet/other publication
x live interpretation
Check the ideas listed above against the following questions:

1. How does your choice help to engage visitors with the key objects and the key concept?
2. Which key message/s will this choice support?
3. How will this choice help achieve your learning, emotional and/or behavioural objectives?
4. Do your chosen methods of interpretation meet the needs and build on the interests of your audience/s?
5. How will your chosen methods of interpretation contribute to creating the experience you want your
visitors to have?
-15- UV3916
Exhibit 1 (continued)
DISABILITY AWARENESS
1. In this display, what evidence is there that disabled people existed?

2. What areas are there that disabled people may think differently from non-disabled audiences when looking
at this display?
3. How might non-disabled people learn something about disability by engaging with this display?
4. How well integrated is the evidence of disability in this display? (It should be a natural connection, not
“bolted on.”)
5. Are there any disabled groups, which should be consulted to help inform the content of this display?
MULTICULTURAL AWARENESS
1. Are there connections to people from different cultures in this display?

2. How well integrated are the multicultural connections in this display? (It should be a natural connection,
not “bolted on.”)
3. What areas are there that people from different cultures may think differently when looking at this display?
4. How might people learn something about other cultures by engaging with this display?
5. Are there any groups from other cultures, which should be consulted to help inform the content of this
display?

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UV3916

September 26, 2009

LEADING INNOVATION AT KELVINGROVE (A)

Previous innovation efforts in the museum community in Glasgow had been

O’Neill Arrives at Kelvingrove

Within a month of joining Kelvingrove as director of Social History in August 1990,

I came late to museums. At college, I studied English literature and European

Taking advantage of a back-to-work scheme for the unemployed in arts administration,

Although O’Neill felt uncomfortable with talk of leadership, his accomplishments at

With some background reading on the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum of Black

Kelvingrove and the Storytelling Approach

People working in bureaucracies—and museums are classic bureaucracies—

The objectives of the Kelvingrove redisplay application were as follows:

Dealing with Rejection

19th Century 21st Century

We came to see storytelling as a way of moving beyond a view of museum

Building a Leadership Team at Kelvingrove

Evaluation in the Museum Setting

Innovating in the Museum World

Even if you take a really traditional definition of museums—museums are places

And when we answer that question—whether it’s a sense of beauty or

I think, almost by definition, if you develop a deep understanding of the impact

DISPLAY DELIVERY TEAM:

STORY DISPLAY TITLE:

KEY OBJECTS ON WHICH THIS STORY DISPLAY IS BASED

WHAT IS YOUR DISPLAY ABOUT?

WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?

Who are your target audiences?

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY?

WHAT WILL BE THE VISITOR EXPERIENCE?

Is this a multi-sensory display?

WHAT MEDIA DO YOU ENVISAGE USING TO TELL YOUR STORY?

Check the ideas listed above against the following questions:

1. In this display, what evidence is there that disabled people existed?

1. Are there connections to people from different cultures in this display?

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