How to Visit a Museum: 10 Great Tips to Make the Most Out of Your Museum Trip

Introduction – How To Enjoy A Museum?

There is no right or wrong way to enjoy a museum; museums mean something different to each of us. Whether you enjoy quiet contemplation of the scenery and objects or excited chatter about funny portraits in the gallery, you can have a great time at the museum. There are some things you can do to add extra experiences, fun, and appreciation to your museum visit experience. This article will give you top tips and ideas, from planning to reflection, which will help you get the most out of your museum visit.

Top 10 Tips On How To Visit A Museum

1. Research Before You Visit A Museum
2. Plan Your Museum Visit Experience Ahead of Time
3. Plan Your Route Around The Museum
4. Read Information Provided & Ask For More
5. Visit During A Less Busy Time, But Not A Monday!
6. Let Your Local Museum Come To You
7. Take Part In Some Activities While At The Museum
8. Go Behind The Scenes At The Museum
9. Visit Other Hertitage Sites
10. Think Back On Your Museum Visit Experience Afterwards

1. Research Before You Visit A Museum

What museum do you want to visit?

There are many types of museums worldwide, as well as small local museums that offer interesting insights. There are museums focused on a topic such as sports, music, or cinema, and national museums, like the Natural History Museum in London, have many different topics in one place.

Where is your favourite art piece displayed? Is it on tour?

A great way to plan a trip to a museum or gallery is to find something you are interested in and go to see it. Masterpieces like the Mona Lisa don’t move often, but you may be lucky enough to catch your favourite art piece in your local museum if you watch travelling exhibitions. Artworks from artists like Rembrandt and da Vinci are on tour worldwide from museum to museum.

When you’ve picked a museum to visit, you should find out:

• What’s at the museum?
• What’s being loaned to the museum? Is there an exhibition for a limited time?
• What do you want to see at the museum? (This is especially important in large-scale museums with a vast collection)
• What is the museum’s history, and how did it start? Knowing why certain things were collected may enrich your thoughts about the whole experience of the collection. Some museums start from a single person’s collection. For example, the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow started with the anatomical collections of William Hunter.

• Check out the collection—Some museums have their collections catalogues online for you to look through in detail, and most have highlights listed. The Hunterian Museum is one of those institutions.
• Look at their social media. You may learn about new objects in the collection, events, or interesting work in the museum. YouTube is a great tool used by museums to encourage and educate visitors. Try checking out a museum’s YouTube before your trip to get a feel for the place.

2. Plan Your Museum Visit Experience Ahead of Time

There are a few essential things to plan for before you arrive at the museum:

• Food
• Accessibility
• Facilities
• Pricing

Food

Food is only allowed in designated areas of museums (due to pest control measures), so plan meals around your trip or maybe visit the museum café hallway to take a break. You can also pack some sealed snacks in a picnic or cafe area.

Accesibility

It is essential to look up the museum’s accessibility, as some are in older buildings that make disability access difficult or, in some cases, impossible, such as the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. Knowing the best route in and around the museum can help relax your trip.

Some museums and galleries offer low sensory hours for those who suffer from overstimulation. Soundscaping is a standard tool of museums, which may cause issues for some sensitive to noise. You can contact museum staff to discuss spaces with these features beforehand and ask about quiet hours.

Facilities

You may also be interested in the facilities available such as toilets and baby changing facilities. Due to the older buildings, many museums and galleries are in the toilets, which can be unusual and hard to find. One particular Twitter page discusses the toilets at museums and helps people find out-of-the-way bathrooms in museums and galleries. They also raise awareness for bathroom accessibility issues in museums and galleries.

A new one for us 🤔 Does anyone else have collections in toilets? 🏛🚽🏺📚 https://t.co/i0gBuWhqOj

— MuseumToilets🏛🚽 (@MuseumToilets) August 9, 2022

Pricing

Pricing may be a consideration when planning your trip to the museum, as there may be entry fees or paid exhibitions which you may not want to miss. It is best to look up the pricing of the museum or gallery before you arrive and check for concession discounts. Also worth checking is:

• Do they offer a local discount (if you live near the museum)? Museums often want to encourage community engagement, which means they may offer discounts or free entry to locals.
• For example, the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery offers residents with proof of address free entry to the Brighton and Hove area.

• Do they offer a multi-museum pass? This is especially important in big cities with multiple museums in a small area.
• For Example, Berlin’s Museum Island contains five museums. Instead of buying five tickets, you can buy one that gets you into all five. You can book these tickets online or at any of the five museums on the island.

Avoiding Museum Fatigue

Museum fatigue starts to kick in after around 2 hours in a museum, a significant hindrance for the dedicated tourist trying to see the whole national museum in one day. Your brain can only take in so much, and your feet will get sore. The best ways to avoid museum fatigue are:

• Wear comfortable shoes
• Use the benches provided to take a break
• Plan only to see the best things you want to see when organising your visit.
• Drink water while you walk around
• Stop for lunch or a snack halfway around
• It may be helpful to break up your exploration into two days for more prominent museums. Some museums even offer a returning ticket, so you can come and go for the duration of your trip or the rest of the week, month, or year.
• Don’t worry if you don’t see everything; take your time to enjoy what you see.

3. Plan Your Route Around The Museum

Once you have an idea of the museum you are going to, what is available to see there, and the scale of the museum, it is probably a good idea to plan how to tackle your museum visit experience. When you visit a museum, it can be overwhelming without a plan, so ask yourself:

• Can I walk around this entire museum in one go? If not, where can I take breaks?
• Is there a set route? Do you want to start from the top or the bottom? What rooms matter most to you?
• What objects do you need to see during your trip? Look online for where those things are and plan your route around them. You might not see everything in a large museum, but you won’t be disappointed this way.
• Do they have a map? You can usually grab a map at the information desk or online before you go. You could also take a virtual tour or check if the museum has an app. These are upcoming options for museums trying to increase their accessibility to visitors.

You can even watch tours of previous exhibits or existing museum spaces on YouTube to learn more about what to expect.

4. Read Information Provided & Ask For More

You don’t have to visit a museum blind; lots of information is available before you go or pick it up at the front desk. Museums often provide audio guides, object labels printed in large text for easy reading, and even activities for kids visiting a museum. These are provided online or at the museum; checking before visiting is always a great idea so you don’t miss out on new information or a fun family activity. You may even find colouring sheets to bring with you that correspond to different galleries.

Try talking to a staff member, especially one stationed in the galleries. They see the pieces every day and may be able to reveal some interesting secrets about them.

An Interesting Example:

This painting, created by a Northern Irish artist named John Lavery, is displayed at the Ulster Museum in Belfast. When talking to a gallery attendant there, I learned the most exciting thing about the painting: how people look at it.

Lavery’s careful use of light affects how this painting is viewed. Her face first catches your attention, then travels down the belt at her waist, goes to her shoe, where the light glints, and returns to her hand. When you watch visitors looking at the painting, you can see their eyes moving in the shape of a diamond as they follow the light with their eyes. I never would have known without talking to the staff there; it was worth asking some questions.

5. Visit During A Less Busy Time, But Not A Monday!

Most museums close on Monday due to the fact they open all weekend. Museums also have times when they are most busy, like Sunday afternoons.

Search engines with visitor analytics, such as Google, can help you check the museums’ busiest times so you can best plan your trip to avoid being overwhelmed by crowds. Going at a less busy time allows you to take your time better, enjoy the scenery of the galleries, and look at the objects more closely.

6. Let Your Local Museum Come To You

Some museums are even willing to come to you. Schools, libraries, community centres, and nursing homes can all have museum outreach programs for those who feel uncomfortable or can visit a museum. In some cases, handling kits and exciting activities can be brought to your community. This is the case for Glasgow Life, which provides a collection of tactile objects to various community groups to show them the work in Glasgow’s museums. The staff at Leighton and Sambourne House in London have created a portfolio of their collections to share with those who can’t visit in person.

Contact your local museums to ask about what they do in your community. You may even have the chance to set up a new community outreach program.

7. Take Part In Some Activities While At The Museum

When you visit a museum, you don’t have just to look around and take in the scenery. These are a few fun activities to try during your museum visit experience:

• Book a Tour—This is a great way to see everything you want and learn about the collection and how it came to be at the museums. Make sure to ask lots of questions.
• Go to a Museum Event – most museums don’t just offer tours; they offer crafting classes, movie screenings, children’s takeovers, and much more.
• Try some Object Observation. Museum professionals use this technique when researching an object to try and understand it fully. Some methods are as simple as looking at an object from a distance to tell if it was meant to be used for something more intricate or large-scale. There are many methods of object observation, but there are no correct answers. Try looking at damage or wear on objects; this might give you an idea of how it was used.
• Create art at the art gallery – draw what you see, recreate a masterpiece, or write some poetry or a report on your thoughts about the collection.
• Play an observation-based game—please don’t play tag in museums, but you can play the ‘Dog Painting Game’, when you compete with your friends or family to try and spot a dog in a painting first. You can also play the ‘Cat Painting Game’ if you aren’t a cat person. Or even a game called ‘Who Can Find the Silliest Mustache in a Painting Game’, which is excellent as there will be lots of fierce debate.

8. Go Behind The Scenes At The Museum

You can see more of a museum and understand its work in a few ways. Many exciting work goes on behind the scenes, and most of the museum’s collection is stored there.

To see more from the museum, why not try:

• Watching behind-the-scenes content: There are lots of YouTube videos from museums, and the Victoria and Albert Museum has a whole TV series on its work.
• Check out their website. Museums often have blogs or information pages that tell you more about their team and what they do.
• Booking a Tour—Check online to see if the museum you are visiting offers a behind-the-scenes tour that includes visits to its collection stores or conservation studios.
• While at the museum, pretend to be a curator. Discuss how things are displayed and maybe make up your exhibition plan. This can help you think about the museum and the objects differently.

9. Visit Other Heritage Sites

Traditional gallery-style museums aren’t the only option for an exciting heritage day out. Why not try a historic house, a medieval castle, or an archaeological site? These sites often have a museum as well. Visiting a landmark dwelling is an exciting and tactile way to interact with history.

Why not visit George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, the Old Bishops Palace in Wolvesey Castle, Winchester, UK, or the border that held back the Romans at Hadrian’s Wall?

10. Think Back On Your Museum Visit Experience Afterwards

After walking around a museum, Maybe visit the shop; if you love a piece of art, you could buy a print of it to display at home for a unique décor piece.

After that, if you found a particular person, period, or object interesting, why not learn more about it? The museum can be the foundation of a new passion you can learn all about. You may even find out about another museum with more on that topic or a way of visiting your new favourite historical figure’s house.

The most important thing about getting the most out of your museum visit experience is to enjoy yourself and maybe learn something new. Check out our articles for more museum suggestions, such as the Acropolis Museum, Athens, and more!