I apologize for the long hiatus from posting–it’s been a busy spring, and I can hardly tell you where the summer days have gone. Most recently, I spent the quickly-passing days in happy and engaged thought, as St. Louis just finished hosting the 22^nd Annual Visitor Studies Association Conference. The city even placed mini-people-sized-arches all around town to welcome the researchers, evaluators, museum and other non-profit professionals, as well a federal employees. What can I say? Data just speaks to some cities!

Wait, you mean those weren’t for our conference? You mean to say you haven’t heard about visitor studies?

Well, no better time than the present to learn about this growing community. The theme of this year’s conference, For What It’s Worth: Wrestling with Relevance, Public Value, and Impact, highlights the very reason why the field is so important, not just to the institutions and organizations represented there, but to anyone who has ever visited a national park, zoo, aquarium, or museum of any kind. In the current economic climate, all of these institutions are fighting for their existences and attempting to answer the question “what is our public value?” Better yet, what is public value? And, if you indulge the dedicated visitor studies conference participant, what is public and what is value? This isn’t just some exercise in narcissistic navel-gazing. A growing number of organizations are incorporating into their programming, exhibitions, and mission statements–into the very fabric of their organizational beings–the commitment and obligation to fulfilling some notion of public relevance. The Pulitzer is in good company in this respect. In order to do so, those questions that seek to define what value is and who constitutes our public are essential starting inquiries that can lead us to building meaningful relationships with our communities and neighborhoods and securing these places of informal learning and voluntary experience in the cultural fabric of modern-day human existence.

As we continue to explore these questions of meaning, dialogue with you, our audience, is of paramount importance. And, the information (or data) we gather together is also important and worth being valued and critically assessed by all of us. In future blogs, I’ll explore specific topics in visitor studies-the strategic triangle used as a framework for public value creation, participatory methods of evaluation, and other fun details related to research and evaluation in the field. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas, as we work together to contribute to a data set that exists in fragmented form but holds immense power once aggregated.