Poster

Evaluating Visitor Engagement Through Instagram: A Case Study of the One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection

Museums invite visitors to actively engage in exhibitions. However, it is not easy to understand how visitors experience exhibitions, because people’s motivations and goals to visit museums vary significantly and, therefore, there are no standards to understand their experiences. This research proposes that social media postings can provide implications for visitor engagement. Images posted on Instagram at an exhibition, One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn, are examined as a case study to explore the use of social media for visitor engagement.

A Theoretical Analysis of Independent Business Owners’ Preferences for Informal Information Sources

Independent business owners often prefer informal information sources to formal ones such as library collections. Part of these preferences is rational because contextual and application-oriented information is usually available from informal sources, which are theoretically the best matches for this kind of information. This suggests that, in addition to outreach strategies, efforts to integrate informal sources of business-relevant information can improve public libraries' ability to support independent business owners' information needs.