Delivering the Visitor Experience: How to Create, Manage and Develop an Unforgettable Visitor Experience at Your Museum, Rachel Mackay, Facet Publishing, 2023. 224p. Softcover, $40.98. 9781783305490

Working in visitor focused roles since she was sixteen, serving as a consultant for various projects and institutions, such as the Jewish Museum London, and named as one of the world’s top fifty museum influencers in 2020, Rachel Mackay has twenty years of experience working with museums and heritage organizations. Her new book outlines how museums can offer a patron-centered experience from development to opening debut and through the duration of an exhibition. Divided into three sections, Delivering the Visitor Experience: How to Create, Manage and Develop an Unforgettable Visitor Experience at Your Museum starts with defining what a visitor experience is. Mackay writes, “for me, Visitor Experience is the name given to the people in the museum who look after the overall on-site visitor journey, ensuring that people who come to visit our museums have a safe, easy and enjoyable visit” (p. xvii). Delivering the Visitor Experience guides museums through the process of creating a notable user experience at a heritage institute.

The book is written for a managerial audience in an easy-to-digest manner. While Mackay’s book focuses on UK museums, using acronyms and laws that are specific to Great Britain, content can extend beyond Europe and apply to any related setting. Topics such as forming hiring committees with diverse members, or inspiring a passion for learning in employees may not be traditionally included during the planning and implementation of an exhibition; Mackay, however, emphasizes such topics importance. Mackay argues that it is imperative to the success of a museum not only to attract and hire the right candidates, but to provide onboarding that properly imparts the museum’s mission and vision to new employees from their first day. She emphasizes that you cannot replace a paid position with a volunteer, because an employee will be more committed to the museum’s values. Finding the right mix of employees is vital to the museum’s operation—a crucial point that Mackay explores in the book, describing a variety of situations and concerns at length.

Delivering the Visitor Experience packs in a lot of information while also managing to avoid becoming a dry textbook by including case studies, as well as Mackay’s anecdotal experiences. Examples are typically short and to the point, highlighting and underlining the chapter’s main concept. The case studies provide solid background information to give proper context and include situations from a range of institutions—larger museums and smaller heritage institutions. In the case study of Mary Rose Museum, a museum that focuses specifically on King Henry VIII’s warship relics, the importance of advocacy and how it plays into the visitor experience is stressed. Mackay writes, “by going through those three phases [creating, managing and developing the experience]; doing the legwork of learning from other organisations, gathering evidence from visitor feedback and co-ordinating a response from management team, [the museum] was able to advocate for the visitor and improve the overall experience” (p. 126).

Many academic institutions oversee or have close affiliations with galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) at their institutes. For example, the University of Calgary houses archives, a library system supporting research and the curriculum, a military museum, and an exhibit gallery under its domain. Because museums are under the GLAM aegis, they reflect many of the same tenants as librarianship. Seeing work as a collaboration between staff, volunteers, trustees and the audience illustrates the need for all parties to work together to create a memorable user experience (p. 139), which is similar to how library departments coordinate work to provide patrons with comprehensive services and resources.

There is also a strong focus on soft skills; throughout the book Mackay notes that the staff can be taught the content of the job, but that soft skills should be sought out when hiring. Mackay suggests making positions accessible by not requiring master’s degrees, which generally emphasize tangible, hard skills. Hiring workers who have a passion for learning (a soft skill) is more important than technical requirements, which can be taught. Mackay writes, “Visitor Experience was seen as the way into a museum career, rather than a specialism in itself” (p. 179).

Mackay ties everything back to the user experience; she states, “museums and cultural organisations exist not just to preserve the past, but to have an impact on the future through inspiring change in their visitors” (p. 85). In Delivering the Visitor Experience, Mackay offers an engaging, comprehensive guide to building and enhancing the museum visitor’s experience. In addition, the formatting of the book is done well with charts and diagrams used necessarily when illustrating particular points. The eBook format is interactive, with the contents of the book appearing on the left-hand side in a non-intrusive manner. Delivering the Visitor Experience will be useful to any institution interested in putting together an unforgettable gallery presentation. — Kaia MacLeod, Indigenous Cataloguing Librarian, University of Calgary