Open for business, but when?

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.