Front-end Evaluation - beyond the Field of Dreams
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Abstract
If you build it they will come (adapted from the baseball movie Field of Dreams) - a phrase we would like to think applies to all our museum exhibitions, programs and events. Unfortunately, if we build it they, the public, won’t necessarily come even though many planners, curators, directors, and so on still think that they will! One way of addressing this challenge is through a process called front-end evaluation. This paper focuses on the front-end evaluation conducted for the Australian Museum’s important new exhibition Indigenous Australians: Australia’s First Peoples which opened in March 1997.