A team of Hungarian and German expertise will work across three sites in Budapest.
The Hungarian Association of Cultural Heritage Managers (www.heritagemanager.hu) has once again teamed up with the German company, KON-TIKI – Interpretive Planning, Training and Evaluation (www.kon-tiki.eu) to deliver a 17-month-long project, sponsored by the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) (www.dbu.de). This was the result of two previous projects in the field of interpretation.
At the core, three large interpretive sites in the area of Budapest will be trained to:
⢠professionally conduct visitor studies;
⢠work on evaluation strategies for each particular site; and
⢠apply the results of the evaluation.
One result will be the development of a new offer along the conceptual ideas of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and/or Planetary Boundaries (PB). During a front-end evaluation, pre-knowledge, naive notions and expectations of potential visitors will be checked and used as a base to develop the new offer.
A successful kick-off meeting was conducted in January in the Hungarian Museum of Tourism and Trade. A one-week workshop in February included a two-day introductory workshop to visitor studies in interpretive sites. Afterwards, during a one-day session in each of the three cooperating sites, evaluation strategies will be developed. The sites are the Museum of Tourism and Trade, Skanzen open-air museum and the Wildlife Park of Budakeszi.
The summer of 2018 will be used by each site to conduct representative visitor studies. At the beginning of 2019 there will be a closing conference during which the project results will be presented.
Those interested in visitor studies or the evaluation of interpretive sites in general can reach the project coordinator, Dr. Lars Wohlers, at lars.wohlers@kon-tiki.eu or the Hungarian coordinator, Ãrpád BÅczen, at arpad@heritagemanager.hu.
A practice-oriented mini-evaluation workshop was held during the Interpret Europe conference in KÅszeg in March. As part of this workshop there was a short analysis of two of the guided tours that had been offered during the conference. Approximately 15-20 conference participants joined the workshop.
Dr. Lars Wohlers is an experiential interpreter who has worked for 12 years at the Leuphana University, Germany, in the field of Informal Education. Since 2006 he has been running his own interpretation consultancy company, KON-TIKI (www.kon-tiki.eu). You can reach Lars at: lars.wohlers@kon-tiki.eu
To cite this article:
Wohlers, Lars (2018) ‘Introducing Visitor Studies to Hungary’. In Interpret Europe Newsletter 1-2018, 27.
Available online:
www.interpret-europe.net/fileadmin/Documents/publications/Newsletters/ie-newsletter_2018-1_spring.pdf
