Creating tours that are interesting and educational for visitors (and guides!) is a challenge every historic site faces. Great Tours! helps you focus clearly on the material culture and significance of your site and then shows you how to use that focus to train and energize your guides. You will be able to move your tours to a fresh new level that is engaging and educational for visitors of all ages and abilities. Readings and workshop activities frame the process throughout and allow you to develop what is most appropriate for your site, while working to strike a realistic balance between ideals and every day reality. Great Tours! offers a unique combination of theoretical guidance and practical activities, supplemented by reproducible forms and a bibliography and index, that make it an invaluable resource for anyone involved with planning tours and training guides. Published in cooperation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Visit their web page.

"Great Tours! is a wonderful resource for sites that want to improve their interpretation and guide training. With loads of activities and practical advice, the book is designed to be adaptable for sites of varying sizes, resource levels and sophistication. Great Tours! does a good job of addressing new issues and problems facing historic sites today. . . . The book's format is easy to use and its program will help any site to strengthen and discipline its interpretation. Great Tours! provides practical help and advice for historic sites, helping them to address the increasingly important and linked questions of visitor experience, good interpretation, and changing audiences." - Insites

"This is a book well worth pursuing ... The kind of book for discovering its contents and placing in a convenient slot on the shelf until an idea strikes and one remembers one of its gems and reaches for it once again." - ALHFAM Bulletin

"...this excellent resouce guide will help every site, no matter how large or small." - Nebraska History

"Great Tours is a practical and easy-to-use training manual for anyone developing guided tours of historic sites.... It is a methodical guide to planning, implementing and managing a guided tour program." - Inform: Newsletter From Museums Of Alberta, Winter 2002

"Bad tours are easy to parody. Great tours are hard to copy. And thus the need for this book... The book is divided into three parts: developing the thematic tour, training guides to give such tours, and finally how to manage guides effectively. It is all to the good that the organization is so clearly defined, with the subdivisions given equal care, for the wealth of material would be difficult to absorb without such orderly presentation... One cannot, in all truth, single out a single section or chapter as more useful than another, but there is no doubt that in working with enthusiastic guides the training activities, formatted as worksheets, will be invaluable. Although packed tight with information, the messages are succinct. It will be an unusual reader who does not underline constantly with a pencil or else scatter 'stickies' throughout to secure the most salient places." - Museline, Texas Association Of Museums