Interaction vital for museum visitors

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The Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation attracted 15,000 visitors between June 1 and July 24.

Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation smashes visitor numbers with personal, local approach.

The recently-opened Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation, part of Sharjah Museums Department (SMD), is training local guides in order to offer visitors a personal interaction service.

Collections advisor and co-director of the museum Dr Ulrike Al-Khaimas said: "There are different ways to access the museum at the moment. A guidebook is underway, but there are no audio guides yet. We have local guides that are being trained to take people round and answer questions".

The museum has seven galleries displayed according to themes such as science and technology, Islam as a faith and Islamic art, with around 5000 artefacts from His Highness Dr Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qassimi's collections.

"Although the galleries are accessible and in many places there is extensive interpretation, I think that personal interaction is very important, not only and not primarily for the locals but for tourists," said Al-Khaimas.

"There is an opportunity for people to come together and ask questions and get to know each other and interact. And these days especially I think that is very important and the guides can play a very valuable role," she continued.

The education of school children would also be a priority, said Al-Khaimas.

"The SMD education department has an extensive schools' programme underway, collaborating with schools in Sharjah and further afield to come and have workshops directly related to the curriculum of the school," she said.

The museum already holds interactive family workshops in Arabic and English on the first Saturday of every month.

Al-Khaimas added that the workshops and hands-on guides would also be a positive service for local people, because "museum visiting is still a new idea as far as people here are concerned".

"Often when cultural events are put on locals do not show much interest, but we have really had a fantastically steady flow of locals and Muslim visitors since the day the museum opened, so there's obviously a great interest.

"Also, tourists are visiting increasingly. Although we haven't seen that many tourists simply because it's the summer period, we have had incredible interest from tourist organisations and tour operators," added Al-Khaimas.

The museum recently held a travel trade open day on-site, with representatives from hotels, DMCs and Sharjah Commerce and Tourism Development Authority attending, and Al-Khaimas said it would be running further training programmes throughout September and October so she expected that tourist numbers would "pick up quite considerably".

Another reason for the museum's success, suggested Al-Khaimas, would be its universal approach.

"It's not an Islamic museum in the sense that it's purely religiously motivated at all," she said.

"It's a universal museum in that it deals with so many disciplines - art, religion, science and mathematics - so it really gives a flavour of Islamic civilisation."

"That is the really innovative aspect of it because most Islamic museums in the region and further afield tend to deal with Islamic art. Here we have a much broader approach and we are very much committed to catering for the local audience, Muslim audience and tourist audience," explained Al-Khaimas.

"We are also hoping to establish a regular exhibition programme," she said.

"We are waiting to receive an exhibition from the Kuwait Islamic Museum in October and from then on we are aiming to have two temporary exhibitions a year," she said, adding that this should help attract an even wider range of visitors.

"From the number of visitors that are coming through the door, I'm fairly certain it's people from beyond Sharjah that are coming," said Al-Khaimas.

Compared to other attractions within SMD, and considering the fact that Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation only opened on June 1, its visitor numbers have been impressive during the summer period.

SMD tourism marketing manager Conny Boettger said that from June 1 to July 24, the museum had received 15,000 visitors.

This compared to 9435 visitors for the Natural History Museum and Botanical Museum, 3260 for the Science Museum and just 195 for Sharjah Heritage Museum during the month of May.

"These are summer visitor numbers, which generally tend to be lower than winter visitor statistics," explained Boettger.

"In any case, the table demonstrates that our new sites - Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation and Sharjah Aquarium - have clearly become our key visitor attractions and are most visited to date," she said.

SMD's major success story this summer was Sharjah Aquarium, which opened at the same time as Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation and recorded 100,000 visitors during its first seven weeks of operation.

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