In most museums, the sign says: "Please do not touch." At the Harbour Museum of Life, the sign says: "Please touch." Visitors can pick up a Roman helmet, stroke the skin of a stuffed crocodile or hold a seventeenth-century sailor's compass. The idea, says director Lena Marsh, is simple. "We remember what we feel, not only what we see."
Critics predicted a disaster. Objects break, they said, and a museum is a place for protecting the past. Marsh agrees that some pieces are too precious to touch. For those, the museum has made exact copies. But the objects in the main hall are real, and the staff accept that they will wear out. "Every scratch is a story of a person who cared enough to hold it," she says.
Damage has been smaller than expected. In three years, repairs have cost about three percent of the budget. The museum has even turned the problem into a feature: an open workshop, in the middle of the building, where visitors can watch restorers repair broken items.
The results are surprising. Attendance has doubled, and a study by a nearby university found that children remembered 40 percent more details after a visit than after a visit to a traditional museum. Visually impaired visitors, who rarely felt welcome in museums before, now come in groups.
Not everyone is convinced. One historian says that "touch is a slow disaster" and that objects will be lost in a hundred years. Marsh has an answer: "In a hundred years, a quiet museum with perfect objects and no visitors will also have lost something."
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.