A broad range of museums responded, from small museums with only one full-time educator on staff to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with 50 full time educators on staff. Of those museums reporting, the lowest was one full time employee, the highest was 70 full time staff and the median was 5 full time staff. The size of the museums participating in the survey ranged from 2,000 square feet to 4 city blocks, and the size of the museums’ collections ranged from 285 objects, to 2 million objects. The median museum collection size was 13,000 objects. The annual operating budgets of museums completing the survey ranged from $575,000 per year to $49 million per year. The median annual operating budget was $3,000,000.

The survey asked museum educators questions in seven areas of programming: tour programs; informal gallery learning programs; community, adult and family programs; classes and other public programs; partnerships with other organizations; school programs; and online educational programs. Each of the seven program areas contained between two and eight checkbox responses, as well as a fill-in box where participants could indicate other programs they offer that did not appear on the survey.

The survey and the resulting report is by no means exhaustive. This report presents a broad brushstroke of art museum education programs and analysis of each survey program area. Relationships between program areas and correlations that include museum demographic information are not included in this report, but the authors invite anyone to pursue these further investigations. Raw data from the survey is available in spreadsheet form for further analysis, and any additional findings will be published on the Museum-Ed Web site. In the future, the museum education community may find it useful to survey other types of museums such as history, science and children’s museums. The authors of this survey hope that profiling the field of museum education can be an ongoing effort, and welcome input and collaboration from all aspects of the museum education community.