Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing desk in her Hartford home.
When we visit the home of a famous writer, what are we hoping to discover? The works have already been written. Their biographies have been published. Their letters have been collected. So what can walking through the rooms where they lived add to our understanding?
Those questions were on my mind as I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut. The Center asks visitors to look beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin and consider how Harriet Beecher Stowe became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential antislavery writers. It is an ambitious interpretive approach, one that emphasizes the firsthand accounts of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, abolitionist networks, and the many individuals whose experiences, testimony, and activism shaped Stowe’s writing.
As I reflected on the tour afterward, however, I found myself asking a different question: What can a historic house contribute to this story that no biography, lecture, or documentary can?
A period room at the Bern History Museum in Switzerland.
We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. In the art museums of German-speaking Switzerland, I noticed a strong tendency to organize galleries around named private collections, or Sammlungen. In the history museums and historic sites, I noticed something different: interpretive practices in transition.
Some sites still rely on familiar approaches: chronological narratives, object identification, and basic descriptions of place. But many museums are clearly rethinking their exhibitions. They are experimenting with new interpretive layers, broader contexts, difficult histories, and more ambitious questions about identity, science, colonialism, and national memory.
The results are uneven, but they are worth attention. Swiss history museums seem to be moving beyond “what happened?” and “what is this object?” toward more complex questions: What systems produced this wealth? How did a person’s life connect to larger social and technological changes? How is national identity constructed? What should be done with inherited installations that no longer speak clearly to visitors?
For museum professionals elsewhere, the Swiss examples offer several useful lessons.
Museums spend a lot of time thinking about how to ask people for support. We spend far less time thinking about what happens after someone says yes.
Recently, I made a gift to President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., in support of Students Opposing Slavery, a project I have long admired. Within a short time, a small box arrived in the mail. Before I even opened it, the package already looked intentional: a Team Lincoln logo with a blue accent on a sturdy thin white box. What could this possibly contain?
Note: This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of how museums and historic sites can define meaningful visitor experiences. I continue that work in “Beyond ‘Learn’ and ‘Appreciate’: Writing Better Visitor Outcomes,” which builds on these ideas by introducing five Outcome Types and a more structured approach to writing interpretive outcomes.
For several years, I have been adapting L. Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning for use in museums and historic sites. Fink’s framework is enormously useful in formal education because it pushes teachers beyond simple content delivery (i.e., foundational knowledge) to application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn. That is a helpful corrective in classrooms, where learning unfolds over a semester and where students can be asked to practice, reflect, revise, and demonstrate growth. But I am increasingly convinced that this framework does not translate as easily as I hoped to the interpretation of house museums and historic sites.
The problem is not Fink’s taxonomy itself. The problem is that historic site visitors are usually not students in a course. They are often there by choice, joined by family or friends, have uneven prior knowledge, and motivated by many different reasons: curiosity, leisure, family activity, travel, identity, or a search for meaning. They may spend 45 minutes in a guided tour, 20 minutes in an exhibition, or an afternoon in the gardens. We need a framework that recognizes these distinct conditions.
My earlier handout, “Verbs for Significant Learning Outcomes,” tried to help museums define what they wanted visitors to know, feel, or do and to create relevant, meaningful experiences. That part still feels right. The challenge is that the categories remained too close to classroom learning. Some verbs—apply, execute, operate, practice, monitor—make sense for students or professional training but are less useful for visitors at a historic house. Because house museums and historic sites interpret history, the framework should also reflect the discipline’s core practices: using evidence, recognizing perspective, acknowledging uncertainty, connecting local stories to broader patterns, and inviting public dialogue about the past. More importantly, the framework did not clearly align with the visitor journey from first encounter to deeper meaning.
That’s a lot to juggle and I may be dropping a few balls, so here’s my preliminary draft work-in-progress revised framework organized around two related ideas: Outcome Level and Outcome Ambition.
Outcome Levels
The OutcomeLevel describes the kind of visitor change an interpretive experience is designed to support. In plain terms, it asks: What kind of change are we trying to create in visitors? Imagine levels as a journey on a nature trail: getting oriented at the trailhead; noticing plants, insects, animals, and geology; seeing how parts of the ecosystem connect; pausing at an overlook to understand the larger landscape; and leaving with a clearer sense of what you learned, what matters to you, and what you might do next.
Do I need permission to take photos of a guided tour in a museum?
In the previous posts in this series, I looked at visitor codes of conduct, visitor photography policies, and commercial or media photography policies. Those policies are becoming more visible because photography is no longer a simple matter of “Can I take a picture?” A single image can be a personal memory, a social media post, a teaching tool, a scholarly document, a news illustration, a commercial asset, or evidence in a public debate.
This final post turns to the more complicated issues: fair use, copyright, photo releases, privacy, and ethics. As a reminder, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Museums should consult an attorney when writing policies involving copyright, image permissions, privacy, publicity rights, releases, commercial use, or contracts. My purpose here is to identify common points of confusion that arise when museums, visitors, writers, teachers, scholars, and photographers try to understand what permission is needed and from whom.
I encounter these questions in my own work. As someone who photographs museums and historic sites for this blog, teaching, consulting, and research, I occasionally wonder: should I ask permission from the museum before publishing a photograph of an exhibition? Do I need a model release if visitors appear in the background? Is it appropriate to photograph a historic house where people still live nearby? Does it matter if I am writing criticism, promoting the museum, or using the image in a paid presentation?
These questions are often confused with a different issue: what museums need to do when they use images of visitors for their own promotional purposes. A visitor taking a photograph in a gallery, a museum using a child’s image in a fundraising campaign, and a company filming a commercial in a sculpture garden are not the same thing. They raise different legal, ethical, and managerial questions. Policies should be clear enough that frontline staff can explain them without being expected to interpret copyright law, privacy law, or fair use on the spot.
Four Issues That Often Get Confused
Photography policies often blend several distinct issues:
Copyright: who owns the rights to the artwork, photograph, exhibition label, design, film, or other creative work that appears in the image?
Access: what conditions did the museum place on photography as part of admission, ticketing, visitor conduct, or use of its property?
Privacy and publicity: are identifiable people shown in the image, and is their likeness being used in a way that requires permission?
Ethics: even if a photograph is legally permissible, is it respectful, accurate, safe, and consistent with the museum’s values and the dignity of the people, places, and stories involved?
Wedding photo taken at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. Credit: Sherri Barber Photography.
In the previous post in this series, I looked at visitor photography policies: whether visitors can take pictures, where they can take them, what equipment they can use, and how museums distinguish casual personal photography from behavior that disrupts the visitor experience. But there is another side to museum photography policies.
When photography moves beyond ordinary visitor memory-making, the questions become more complicated. A museum gallery, historic house, a picturesque barn, sculpture garden, or historic landscape can quickly become a backdrop for someone else’s project: a wedding shoot, fashion session, graduation portrait, influencer campaign, documentary film, news segment, advertisement, stock photography shoot, or corporate video. That shift changes the issue. The question is no longer simply, “Can I take a picture?” It becomes: who benefits from the image, what resources are being used, what risks are created, and how is the museum’s name, space, collection, or reputation being presented?
As with the earlier posts, this is not a scientific or comprehensive study. I reviewed a selection of commercial, media, and photography policies from museums and historic sites to identify patterns in current practice. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Museums should consult an attorney when developing policies involving copyright, releases, insurance, contracts, filming agreements, or commercial use. My interest here is in how these policies reflect museum management, visitor experience, institutional risk, and revenue. Just a warning: this is a loooong post because of the complexity of this topic—and I’ll only be touching the surface.
From Visitor Photography to Site Use
The most useful distinction is between photographing a museum and using a museum as a setting. A visitor photographing a child in a gallery, a favorite object, a historic room, or a garden path is usually documenting a visit. A photographer staging an engagement session, fashion shoot, commercial, product video, or sponsored social media post is using the museum as a resource. Those are different activities. They require different policies.
Sign at the entrance to the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico.
What Museum Photography Policies Reveal About Visitor Experiences
While examining visitor codes of conduct, I started noticing another kind of museum policy that is becoming more visible: photography policies. They appear on websites, ticketing pages, “Know Before You Go” guides, and signs in galleries, historic houses, gardens, and exhibitions. Like codes of conduct, photography policies have always existed in some form, but they now seem more detailed, more prominent, and more complicated.
At first glance, the question seems simple: can visitors take pictures? But museum photography policies reveal that this is no longer a yes-or-no issue. The better question is: what kind of photography, by whom, for what purpose, in what space, and with what effect on collections, staff, visitors, and the experience?
To explore this question, I reviewed photography rules embedded in dozens of visitor codes of conduct and visitor policy pages from museums and historic sites. This was not a scientific or comprehensive study. It was an initial scan of current practice to identify common patterns and management issues. I am not offering legal advice here; museums should consult an attorney on copyright, releases, privacy, and commercial use. My interest is in how these policies shape visitor experience and staff decision-making.
The broad trend is clear: casual, personal photography is increasingly welcomed, but excessive equipment and disruptive, staged, or commercial photography is increasingly controlled.
To purchase tickets online for the Emily Dickinson Museum requires compliance with their Code of Conduct.
I’m encountering codes of conduct more frequently as I visit museums and historic sites. They’re not only posted near entrances, but increasingly appear on websites as I buy tickets or plan a visit. Museums and historic sites have always had expectations for visitors—don’t touch, no food—but they’ve never seemed so prominent.
That made me wonder: are our efforts to be more inclusive and welcoming attracting visitors who are unfamiliar with our expectations? Has the current political climate encouraged more conflict and confrontation in public spaces? Are front-line staff experiencing more difficult visitor behavior? Or are museums simply becoming more explicit about rules that were once assumed?
To find out, I examined dozens of visitor codes of conduct from museums and historic sites in the United States that were available online using Google’s search feature. This was not a scientific or comprehensive study. It was more of an initial exploration of what seems to be happening in the field.
What I found is that visitor codes of conduct are no longer just about protecting collections. They are becoming management tools.
The Virginia State Capitol offers guided and self-guided tours to visitors.
When I agreed to conduct a Museum Assessment Program (MAP) review for the Virginia State Capitol, I knew it would be an unusual assignment. MAP is designed for museums—institutions with clear missions centered on collections, exhibitions, and interpretation. The Capitol, however, is not a museum. It is the active seat of the General Assembly of Virginia. That distinction matters.
At the Capitol, the “museum function” is secondary—sometimes tertiary—to the work of governance. I’ve completed several MAP assessments but only choose those that relate to my expertise and interests—and the unusual environment engaged me immediately and made me wonder what would happen. Tours, exhibitions, and school programs operate within an environment defined by legislative sessions, security protocols, and shifting public access. I suspected that some museum standards wouldn’t apply. Others—especially those related to education and interpretation—would, but required adaptation. What I discovered is that the most useful part of my visit wasn’t evaluating against museum standards—it was a workshop.
As part of MAP, I facilitated a session to develop guiding principles for the visitor experience (called Education and Interpretation in MAP). Think of them as a set of best practices—but ones developed by the staff themselves, grounded in real situations rather than imposed from outside. Rather than start with abstract values (e.g., diversity, education, creativity) or a series of broad questions (e.g., why does the museum exist? what is the museum’s educational vision?), I used scenarios—real situations staff face every day.
If you’ve ever wondered whether the challenges you’re facing at your historic site or house museum are typical or unusual, there is some collective evidence to draw on.
For the past decade, Ken Turino and I have led Reimagining Historic House Museums workshops across the country for the American Association for State and Local History, based on our book of the same name. We begin each workshop with a simple but revealing question: What is the greatest challenge facing your site?
We have collected these responses from a wide range of locations (such Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Texas, and Maryland) from a wide range of participants (staff, boardmembers, and volunteers). From a sampling of these lists, I used ChatGPT to analyze and synthesize the responses into the seven overarching issues, each representing a structural or strategic challenge. While the data was not collected in a scientific manner (participants are self-selecting, not random), the consistency of responses across regions and institution types is striking.
The most frequently cited—and arguably most consequential—is relevance and interpretive stagnation.
