Abstract:

[Purpose/Significance] As an essential part of the modern public cultural service system, museums are expected not only to preserve and interpret cultural heritage, but also to respond more effectively to the growing and diverse cultural needs of the public. Against this background, this paper explores innovative practices delivering high-quality museum services directly to grassroots communities in China. The goal is to identify representative forms, distill key features, and support the development of a long-term and institutionalized mechanism for delivering museum services to these communities. This paper theoretically focuses on the structural logic and operational mechanisms of direct service delivery, thereby extending existing research on public cultural services in museums and deepening our understanding of how these services are reorganized during public cultural service transformation. In practice, this paper clarifies the major forms, common features, and developmental directions of grassroots museum services, and thus it provides useful references for improving resource allocation, optimizing service organization, strengthening grassroots service capacity, and promoting the institutionalization of high-quality museum services. [Method/Process] This paper adopts a multi-case study approach. This approach is appropriate because the direct delivery of high-quality museum services to grassroots communities is not a single, standardized process. Rather it is a complex, practical phenomenon involving multiple organizational forms, service scenarios, and the relationships between different actors. To capture such complexity, this paper selects representative cases of museum innovation in China and conducts an in-depth comparative analysis. Specifically, the analysis is organized around the four basic elements of museums, namely collections, space, technology, and people. It examines a series of innovative practices, including resource delivery, spatial direct access, network-based reach, collaborative participation, and systematic integration. By analyzing how museum collections are circulated through physical delivery and symbolic transformation, how museum service spaces are extended and embedded into grassroots settings, how digital technologies expand service reach beyond temporal and spatial constraints, how the public participates in the co-production of content and services, and how collections, spaces, technologies, and people are systematically integrated within an institutional framework, this paper reveals the internal logic and common patterns of delivering museum services directly to the grassroots communities. [Results/Conclusions] This study found that the direct delivery of high-quality museum services to grassroots communities is mainly characterized by a systematic supply, ubiquitous scenarios, precise service delivery, and collaborative participation. Based on these findings, this study proposes four pathways for further improving the mechanism of direct grassroots museum service delivery: establishing a coordinated mechanism for resource allocation, improving the operational mechanism of grassroots service facilities, optimizing the dynamic alignment mechanism between service supply and local demand, and strengthening the capacity-building mechanism for grassroots receiving entities. These findings suggest that the sustainable development of grassroots museum services depends not only on greater resource input and technological support, but also on the systematic coordination of collections, spaces, technologies, and people within an institutional framework. Due to the limited scope of the selected cases and the level of generalization, future research may examine contextual differences across museum types and regions more thoroughly. Additionally, more refined indicators may be developed to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of grassroots museum service delivery.

Key words: museum, high-quality services, direct-to-grassroots delivery, public cultural services, cultural and creative industry development