Report: Museums - Citizens and Sustainable Solutions | Denmark

As part of the educational plan for Danish museums, which is to contribute to improving the educational role of museums, the Danish Agency for Culture (Kulturstyrelsen) conducts regular user surveys. On the basis of the 2014 survey of museum audiences, the Danish Agency for Culture invited museum leaders and researchers from Denmark and elsewhere to present their views on what sustainability means in a museum context. The articles collected in Museums - Citizens and Sustainable Solutions reflect and analyse how museums work based on an integrated and complex understanding of sustainability that builds on culture in interplay with social, economic and environmental parameters. This means the development of horizontal organisations, the recognition of people's different gender, age, education, ethnicity, spirituality and sexual orientation, and thus the unfolding of the potentials that are inherent in diversity. The Danish Agency for Culture's User Survey is in itself a sustainable solution through which the state-owned and state-approved museums and the Agency, in collaboration with other cultural institutions, universities and the Association of Danish Museums, have generated a unique, creative data material. The User Survey is a result of increased transparency about the museums’ user profiles and a joint starting point for the professional development of the museums through knowledge sharing of results and experience between the museums and with the surrounding society. Museums – Citizens and Sustainable Solutions continues to build on the Danish Agency for Culture’s publications Museums – Social Learning Spaces and Knowledge Producing Processes, 2013, and Museums – Knowledge, Democracy, Transformation, 2014. It presents practical and theoretical experiences and analyses of the User Survey’s local and national results with contributions from distinctive Danish and foreign museum leaders and staff as well as researchers. The publication is available in English, free of charge, at http://www.kulturstyrelsen.dk/videnbank/publikationer/museums-citizens-and-sustainable-solutions/