Recalculating.....In 400 Feet Turn Left.

This past week has seen good steps towards clarifying the direction of my paper as well as my internship with the Seneca Park Zoo. Meeting with Bart Roselli and Emily Coon-Frisch earlier this week helped to identify areas at the zoo which could potentially benefit from more attention in my thesis. Some of these areas included exhibit and program effectiveness, satisfaction, and evaluation measures. After meeting with Mr. Roselli and Ms. Coon-Frisch, I met with Dr. Decker and discussed how these items could shape my paper. In our meeting, we discussed changing the literature review of visitor studies into a project centered on the creation of two evaluation tool kits for use at the Seneca Park Zoo: one for exhibitions and one for programs. These tool kits, in our opinion, could provide a more applicable instrument for visitor studies at the zoo as well as structuring the framework of future evaluations.

This shift in direction is, thankfully, not a complete overhaul of my previous plans, but rather a more narrowed application of the research I have compiled over the last year. Much of the research I had gathered already related in some way or another to exhibitions, programs, or evaluations. In this sense, I already had a relatively strong base of knowledge. The challenge now becomes locating and synthesizing published research from zoos and aquariums themselves about evaluation measures and using this information to compile best practices and methods.