Examination of museum visitors historical space perception in the scope of cultural heritage management

The use of historical buildings as museums by re-functioning within the scope of cultural heritage management is a very common practice in our country. While evaluating the architectural potential of the building during the exhibition design process in museum buildings obtained by re-functioning historical buildings; it is important to determine the exhibition and presentation techniques with the artifacts related to the collection in a way that will form a compatible whole with the architecture, taking into account the meanings of the historical building as also an artifact to be exhibited, to present the museum to the visitors in a context in order to convey and protect the cultural heritage correctly. The purpose of this research is to examine the accordance of the historical buildings in the province of Izmir used as museums by re-functioning within the scope of cultural heritage management in terms of city, building, collection and exhibition design and to determine the historical space perception of museum visitors and to reveal the results with the scale called "Spatial Organization Perception in Museums" which was developed within the scope of the research to increase the quality of the services offered by museums. The scale developed for this purpose was applied to the visitors of İzmir Atatürk Museum and İzmir History and Art Museum between June and August 2020. In the first chapter of the research, the conceptual-theoretical framework is included. In the second chapter, there are literature researches about the conceptual framework. In the third chapter, the method of the research is given. In the analysis of the data obtained from the scale applied within the scope of the research, two-sample t-test and One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) independent of parametric hypothesis tests were used. In addition, factor analysis, which is one of the multivariate statistical analysis techniques, was also used in the study. The results of the analyzes are presented within the scope of the research together with suggestions for increasing the service quality of the museums based on the historical place perceptions of the visitors visiting the determined museums. Keywords: Cultural Heritage, Cultural Heritage Management, Museum, Exhibition, City, Historical Buildings, Re-functioning, Spatial Organization, Museum Visitors