TL;DR

My new acquaintance K.C. and I were watching a conference talk. She runs a museum. When a slide defined “TL;DR” for the audience (“Too Long, Didn’t Read”) she whispered to me, “That’s what all our exhibits are.”

Heh. She’s right.

There is a natural divide between our visitors and our subject matter experts (SMEs) — much as I love both.

Our visitors come for many reasons. 95% of those reasons have nothing to do with formal learning. 0% of them are to “read the latest writing on a subject”.

That’s normal.

Our SMEs, making the content, have opposite motivations. The more credentialed an SME is, the more they are obligated to help people “read the latest writing on a subject”. The longer the text, the more accurate.

Also normal.

The problem is, now we have a lot of text in our exhibitions — and I mean a lot — that none of our visitors are reading.

TL;DR.

Here’s the thing:
Our visitors come for many reasons, but they don’t come to read.

There are many ways we can let people read the latest writing on a subject. It just doesn’t have to be in our exhibitions.

Warmly,
Jonathan