Innovativeness of the museum offer in the cultural education of children and youth: The example of selected museum facilities in Krakow

Abstract

The museum in the modern world meets many needs of the youth, such as the need of aesthetic experience, deepening knowledge, need of pleasant and quality spending of free time. For this reason, the objective of this paper was analysing the educational offer in the con- text of its attractiveness and innovativeness, proposed by several selected museum facilities in Krakow. The largest facility was selected for the analysis, that is the National Museum and the units that have specialised exhibition, like for example the Historical Museum, the Natural His- tory Museum, the Salt Mine Museum in Wieliczka, and the “Manggha” Museum of Japanese Art and Technology. From the point of view of tourism and young visitors, the highest significance comes from making the collections available, as well as from their professional explanations and offering interesting educational enterprises based on own collections.

To enable museum facilities to change their image from the so-called sanctuaries of culture to modern facilities, attractive for a young tourist, changes in the way their collections are presented are necessary. Using computer technology and knowledge is most important here, which means offering the multimedia aspects of the museum exhibition, making the collections available on- line, offering museum meetings on the principle of active participation strategy, offering high degree of interactivity and the “hands-on” experience. The museums in question fully meet the above criteria and may be regarded as modern museum facilities which present their collections at a high European level. The characteristic feature of museum tourism is a high share of single- -day trips in the specialised offer.

The activities of the museums suffer from poor promotion and advertising of their educational products and the resulting local reach and limited knowledge of the offer by tourists coming from outside of the region.