The Naturalist Center: Proof that museums can do more to maximize the learning potential of their collections

There may not be a more passionate group of learners than museum scientists, historians or artists. What if museum visitors had the same freedom to learn from museum collections as researchers do? At the Smithsonian Institution's Naturalist Center we not only examined the environmental factors that have nutured such passion for learning in museum researchers but also successfully reproduced them in a publicly accessible, open storage study collection. Three major functional elements were critical to the Center's success: (1) building a critical mass of information (collections, books, images, databases, etc.) (2) providing access to that information in ways that motivates the public to want to seek information out, and (3) fostering the cognitive skills of inquiry based learning to make the whole experience meaningful to the learner. By incorporating more elements of the learning ecosystem into public offerings, the public not only experiences what fuels museum researchers' unique passion for learning, but also heightens the public's understanding of the subject matter and the learning potential of museums.