WHY DO WE CALL THEM "VISITORS"?

GLAM Guide | Evelyn Feldman

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In my first weeks of my first semester studying Library and Information Science, I was assigned this blog post by Karen Pundsack to read for class. It's been one of those readings I've never forgotten, that has seemed to live in the back of my mind ever since.

Pundsack's post summarizes an ongoing conversation in Public Libraries about what to call the people who use the library. As Pundsack notes, each term brands the library in a different way.

Patron positions the library within a more traditional framework, but is perhaps problematically jargon-like.

Customer positions the library as a product and a financial investment; coming from the business world and carrying a strong corporate undertone, it is perhaps the most controversial of these terms.

User is active, and positions the library as a space to do things, but is perhaps impersonal.

The Toronto Reference Library. What does the Toronto Public Library call the people who come to use it? Source.

I recommend reading the whole article for more terms (student, member, guest, client, visitor) and various arguments for and against many of them.

What I find interesting is how hard it is for an outsider to even find out which term a library system uses, without doing some serious sleuthing (can you figure out which term Toronto Public Library uses, if any? I couldn't!). This lack of surface-level transparency shows just how much these terms exist for the library's own internal conceptualization of itself, rather than as tools for users.

Whichever word a library chooses to use, the decision reflects big questions each library system asks itself: How do we perceive the people who use our services? How do we want them to fit within those services? What do we want our library to be?

What about museums?

Falk & Dierking, who wrote about museum
visitor motivations, inspired Musings'
Falcon Deerking logo. Source.

Entering the Museum Studies half of my degree the following year, this was a big question on my mind: What words do we use in museums?

The answer, as you probably know? It's almost always visitors. 

Of course, there is some variation; I think guests is not uncommon, either. But museums seem pretty settled with their terms. On the other hand, museums focus more on a different set of questions: rather than what do we call people, they ask why do people come. This focus is illustrated in Museum Studies' core concepts like Visitor Research and Museum Visitor Motivations from Falk and Dierking (who inspired Musings' mascots!).


I don't have an argument here, but instead raise this topic to ask questions--

Why these different focuses?

What would it mean for museums if we called the people who walked through our doors users, patrons, or customers?

Why is visitor so standard in museums? What does this say about museums' own internal self-conceptualization?

Even if museums (and libraries!) are well-settled and content with their terms, I love the way that this debate prompts internal reflection on what we want to be as institutions, both individually and collectively.