The Virginia Historical Society (VHS) is in the process of spending $38 million on reimagining its museum.  The purpose of this extensive redesign is to better educate people on Virginia’s history and to increase visitors to the museum.  Having the opportunity to visit the exhibit in progress showed the limitation that space places on an exhibit.  Issues dealing with exhibit design, artifact selection, and the ways that Virginian history will be told must be addressed within the given space of the museum.  The ways that the museum space will be utilized will be influenced by the decisions of historians, exhibit designers, and even those on the board of the museum.

The first decision that has to be made is who the audience will be for the museum.  The answer, to who is the audience, is crucial in the creation of a new exhibit.  Audience is one of the principle driving factors in the creation of the new environment of the museum.  School children who are preparing to take or who have already taken the Virginia Standards of Learning test is one of the largest groups of people who visit the VHS.  Therefore, the design of the museum must address how they will capture their attention along with how to reinforce their learning of the history of Virginia.  One of the most appealing additions to the VHS for school children will be the addition of a computer simulation that will allow people to create their own government through the selection of principles.  However, school children are not the only ones that visit museums.  Therefore, the exhibit must also take into account the desires of others, such as history buffs.  This means that the museum needs to provide specific details on objects, places, and time periods within Virginia’s history that would not be taught in a middle school history class.

Once an audience is established for the museum the question of how to convey they history of Virginia becomes significant. One of these problems is the amount of space the VHS has to tell the entire history of Virginia.  This means hard decisions have to be made as to what can be displayed and how it is to be displayed.  When my “Historian’s Workshop” class visited the VHS we participated in an exercise.  We were given a list of twenty-two items that could be displayed in the American Revolution section of the exhibit and we then had to select only three items.  That doesn’t seem so hard at first because you would just pick the three most important items. Right?  Well, once you read through all the items you could not help but believe that the spectacles belonging to Patrick Henry, Portrait of General George Washington, and Benjamin Bartholomew’s diary were all equally important in telling the history of the American Revolution. This made the task of picking just three items from a list of twenty-two extremely difficult.   The major constraints are those of space and the amount of time visitors will spend in the exhibit.  The limit of space means that the VHS has to be creative in the ways that they use the space to tell the history of Virginia.  Not everything can be displayed and therefore everything that is displayed must be crucial in the conveyance of Virginian history.  The factor of the amount of time visitors will spend in the exhibit determines how items are displayed.  Items needing long descriptions may be seen as less desirable compared to items that need little description or are more easily recognized.

Many people would believe that with a $38 million budget that the VHS would encounter few problems with creating a more attractive space.  However, there are problems that must be overcome.  The VHS is faced with the task of redesigning their exhibit to retain and attract visitors to the museum, while staying true to the mission of educating visitors about the history of Virginia.  Through the careful selection of artifacts and the introduction of new interactive technology the VHS hopes that the redesigned space will convey the history of Virginia in an immersive way that will be both educational and appealing to those who visit the museum.