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Kelvingrove: Telling Stories in a Treasured Old/New Museum
Author(s) -
O'Neill Mark
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
curator: the museum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.312
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 2151-6952
pISSN - 0011-3069
DOI - 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2007.tb00281.x
Subject(s) - visitor pattern , storytelling , visual arts , object (grammar) , order (exchange) , history , art , narrative , computer science , business , literature , finance , artificial intelligence , programming language
“Welcome to the future of museums” is one of the many rave head‐lines that greeted the reopening of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, after a $60 (£30) million refurbishment. This article charts the course of the project over the 16 years it was in development, tells how it survived a number of major setbacks, and recounts the key strategic decisions that led to the creation of an object‐based, visitor‐centered, storytelling museum that was more successful than we dared hope. The project team aimed to integrate the demands of research, design, conservation, education, and communication in order to bring visitors and objects—in all their richness and complexity—into meaningful contact. This process has been rewarded with unprecedented visitor numbers‐3,000,000 in the first year, in a city of 600,000 people.