While walking around the American Museum of Natural History, feelings of nostalgia arose and suddenly I felt my inner child rising within me. I was walking from exhibit to exhibit, barely reading the labels, I was just so excited to be there, to observe all those awesome exhibits. I spent majority of my day at the museum and I still feel like I want to go back and finish exploring!

Arriving at the hall of biodiversity, (which took forever to find because of how terrible I am at reading maps!) I first observed the exhibit that had the crustaceans. I thoroughly read the labels at the exhibit and found that there were plenty of labels to educate the people on each phylum/subphylum. There were some interesting albeit, very specific facts as well.  It spoke about how shrimp are caught in a way that harms the other creatures in the same environment, which was nice to find because it showed the concern for biodiversity loss through human interactions.  Also, it had sort of like an interactive label where the observer can click on the specific species and the computer screen would show some facts about it. There was also an informative video on all the species in that phylum. 

The second exhibit I observed was the Fungi & Lichen – was as informative as the crustaceans in that it did show a concern for a biodiversity threat when it displayed how fungi are threatened because of human consumption, and lichen because of air pollution. It also included a video about the species in the phylums and an awesome visual of models of lichen and fungi. The exhibit was informative and told the important aspects of these species. There was also a computer screen that can show you facts about each species of lichen and fungi.

I was now ready to observe people in their habitat. I tallied a total of 18 people in the course of 15 minutes for the crustaceans and 13 people in the course of 15 minutes for the Lichens & Fungi. The average time stay was 45 seconds. Majority of people started from the bottom of the exhibit and move their eyes upward – from what it looked like, it seemed as though nobody was actually reading the labels thoroughly, but who can blame them? They have an amazing lifelike exhibit right before their eyes, why read when you can just let your eyes absorb the visual! The first guy that was observing the exhibit was there for quite a while… Because he was there, nobody would want to “share” viewing the exhibit with him so they just skipped over it – which sucked! He was really into taking pictures of the exhibit – he took a picture of each aspect of the exhibit, there were a lot of parts, needless to say, he had a lot of pictures. After he moved along, a common trend of people coming taking a picture and leaving, followed. It was interesting to find out that majority of the people would stare at the exhibit, take a picture, look at the label for like two seconds and then move on. However, it is sort of expected for people to act that way in a museum that large. I think because everybody is in such a rush to run off to the next exhibit, they don’t focus or appreciate each individual exhibit.

I think the information for both exhibits didn’t need to be written in a different way, I truly think it was perfect as it was. I don’t think it is the information that’s not attracting the people to stay, rather I think it was more of the people’s impatience to read the information. If the public would take the time to read each exhibits information thoroughly, watch the video till the end, then the public can and will be educated on everything that was displayed in the hall. I think the museum has done a great job in trying to educate the public on what they put in their exhibits, however, it is the job of the public to make the effort and educate themselves by reading the labels.

I think a way to allow the people to enjoy each exhibit in each hall is to have an entrance fee for each hall; the suggested price of the ticket is $22, say, if they charged a dollar per hall, people would pay for each hall they’d like to observe and actually spend the time observing each exhibit, rather than just taking pictures and making a run for it! Though, that’s just an idea.

I had an awesome experience at the museum and I’m definitely going back after finals!