Museum Audience Data Collection System

The Audience Data Collection System provides tools for museums to get to know their visitors. The initiative encourages public studies of Ibero-American museums and represents a step towards the establishment of standard methodologies and concepts. With this system, we sought to both share the data and results to and make it possible to carry out a comparative analysis at the national and international levels in the future.

The project starts with a basic questionnaire that guarantees the most significant possible consensus among the different countries regarding the use of this tool. The survey collects primary audience data, including sociodemographic characteristics, motivations and expectations of the visit, frequency and composition of the visitor group. Building on this material, an application manual was also developed for the proper collection and exploration of data.

The system’s design and user manual were developed by Dr Eloísa Pérez Santos, from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). In addition to the questionnaire, the material has two datasets: one for coding and analysis of the collected material and another for the registration of the various institutions to perform comparative studies between museums, regions, countries or internationally. This additional material is available to all institutions that have previously requested it from the Ibermuseums Program or directly from the IOM.

The IOM’s Museum Audience Data Collection System is, therefore, a tool available to all Ibero-American museums so that they can conduct studies of their audiences, understand the basic socio-demographic profile of their visitors and, consequently, guide the society in which they are inserted most appropriately.

How to request the material for download?

The online version of the IOM Museum Audience Data Collection System, available in Spanish and Portuguese, includes the following electronic documents for museums to produce their own audience studies:

> Questionnaire for visitors, available in Spanish, Portuguese and English (Word)
> Data collection control record (Word)
> Registration of refusals to participate in the study (Word)
> Coding, IOM questionnaire data analysis and public results record (Excel)
> Record of public results for previous research data (Excel)

All Ibero-American museological institutions can request this material through the Ibermuseums portal by filling in the form located in this link.

To use the documents, the institution must include the names of the Ibermuseums Program and the Ibero-American Observatory of Museums in all materials, reports and publications generated through the IOM museum audience data collection system, as well as any applications (public or private) concerning the system. In addition, at the end of the research, the museum will be requested to collaborate by providing the IOM with the data obtained.