Extending Hours

Alisa Martin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:16:41 +0000

It is no secret that the Brooklyn Museum’s public hours have been inconvenient to many of our visitors. From the frustrated tourist arriving on a weekday at 4:30pm only to be told, “Galleries will begin clearing in 15 minutes,” – to our neighbors exiting the Brooklyn Museum/Eastern Parkway subway stop on their way home from work—a 5:00pm closing time represented a serious obstacle to visitation.

Back in March, I initiated an online discussion of the issues and asked for feedback. We heard from many of our friends, and the responses we received helped drive our decision-making. As we performed a delicate balancing act of providing more evening hours without significantly increasing costs, we kept these visitor preferences in mind:

“Keep the weekend morning hours; that’s a quiet, less crowded time that combines well with a brunch.”
“Stay open on Thursdays or Fridays at least until 9.”
“Provide additional late night opportunities to see special exhibitions.”

I’m thrilled that the new public hours announced today meet these goals:

Wednesdays 11-6
Thursdays and Fridays 11-10
Saturdays and Sundays 11-6

We look forward to welcoming everyone as we implement the new schedule on Wednesday, October 6, 2010. For more information, please read our press release (pdf).

Open for business, but when?

Alisa Martin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:51:56 +0000

Our role in Visitor Services is to represent the voice and perspective of the visitor and the team I work with is responsible for many aspects of your Brooklyn Museum experience. As part of the Museum’s mission, we are tasked to make the visitor experience here an excellent one and to that end, we often re-think current policy to make changes that may better meet visitor needs. At the moment, we are in a process to evaluate the hours we are open to the public and we could use your feedback.

Brooklyn Museum via AlejandraPT on Flickr. Licensed CC-BY.

As many of you know, the museum is currently open Wednesdays to Fridays from 10am-5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 11am-6pm, and of course—we are open (and free) on Target First Saturdays from 5pm-11pm. During the week, we know that our current hours meet the needs of school groups and those visitors who have flexibility during the day. And we can tell, given the higher numbers of visitors on the weekends, that Saturdays and Sundays are more convenient for many in our audience. But we wonder—are we missing something, or some people? Are there prospective visitors that want to enjoy what we have to offer, but aren’t able to because of our hours of operation?

While we can’t guarantee that we would be able to change our schedule overnight, we’d like to have a better idea of what an ideal schedule, from the perspective our audience, would be. So this week, on Facebook and Twitter (hashtag #museumhours), I will be asking a few questions about our hours and your preferences and we’d love to hear from you there or in the comments area of this post.

Your thoughts will help us shape the discussion internally and I look forward to hearing from you.

bloggers@brooklynmuseum » Alisa Martin

Extending Hours

Open for business, but when?