Museum engages community: some evidence from Italy

In the XXI century museums are assuming new roles and developing new ways of working to demonstrate their social purpose and impact. The relationship between museums and communities is the cornerstone of the topic: becoming cultural mediators, museums allow communities to be engaged in the process of representing the past, understanding the present and promoting the future of the cultural heritage. This paper aims to understand the contemporary thought and practice about this change, exploring how the relationship between museums and their communities is taking place in the Italian context and what are the potential implications on operational and governance structure and performance. To this purpose, it analyzes a selection of literature and shows the results of a two-step survey on a sample of Italian municipal museums. The community engagement is conceived as a process through which museums may cooperate with and for citizens or groups of people who share places or interests, to face specific issues in order to pursue important benefits both for communities and institutions. As for the results, the use of specific approaches and tools for different degrees of community participation is tangible. The research identifies three archetypes: community as customers of services; community as providers of knowledge; community as entrepreneurs. Even though in most cases the results show that Italian museums engage communities with new communication tools, they open new scenarios about the relationship between the museum governance and its performance.