Advice from me |
| So you want to put a computer exhibit in your museum? - a beginner’s guide. | If you want to install a computer exhibit, but haven't done it before then read this. This short non-technical guide will get you started. |
| Writing a creative brief for a computer exhibit | If you're appointing external contractors to make your exhibit then one of the most important things is the brief you send them to say what you want. Here's a guide to what to put in it and what to leave out. |
| How to buy a computer for a museum exhibit | This document tells what equipment you'll need for a computer exhibit and where to buy it from. It assumes no technical knowledge. |
| Requirements for museum exhibit software | Based on a document used by the Science Museum, London, this document gives a set of basic requirements for the development of exhibit software. |
| Telling stories with games | Games are a great way of telling stories in a museum. In this document I look at how to use games to tell stories and how to design a game to work in a museum. |
| KISS chase – How to keep your exhibit simple | During the development process its very easy to make your exhibit more complicated than it needs to be. This is a more discursive document which looks at why this happens and how to avoid the pitfalls. |
| Video in exhibitions - getting it right | Great video can really bring an exhibitions alive. But it's easy to make mistakes when you're commissioning it and it can be expensive to change afterwards. This document tells you what to watch out for. |
| How to set up a computer for a museum exhibit | Once you've got your computer you need to set it up. This fairly technical document tells you how to set up a Windows computer. |
Gallery exhibits |
| Tate multimedia tour | Home page of the Tate Modern handheld computer tour. Explains the system, gives you a taster and some of the evaluation and research done during its development. A great resource and an example other institutions should follow. |
| Gallery multimedia access guidelines from the Natural History Museum, London | John Benfield is New Media Manager at the Natural History Museum in London. He's written a set of guidelines for making museum kiosks accessible. |
| Exhibit research | Kevin Walker has had many years experience in designing museum computer exhibits. He has worked at the American Museum of Natural History and many other places. His extensive website contains many articles about the theory and practice of museum exhibits plus the technology used in them. |
| Interactive learning in museums of art and design by Gail Durbin (234K) | Gail Durbin describes the how the V & A museum in London used computer exhibits to facilitate learning. This paper goes through the whole process from analysis of visitors' needs, different types of exhibit and surveys on their effectiveness. |
| The British Interactive Group | The British Interactive group brings together many people in the UK who develop interactive exhibits. Although their website is mainly concerned with mechanical exhibits there's a lot of good general advice. |
Visitor studies |
| How do visitors use computer exhibits? Findings from 5 grueling years of watching visitors getting it wrong | Ben Gammon spent many years as Head of Visitor Studies at the Science Museum. Here's the benefit of his experience working with technologies from light beams to fingerprint scanners. |
| Design for museum visitors (1.36MB) | More from Ben Gammon. This presentation includes pictures of museum exhibits and galleries and tells you what visitors thought of them. Includes the best ever summary of why you need visitor studies - "visitors are weird". |
| Gallery-based technology and the museum visitor by Scott Sayre | This published paper considers the use of computer exhibits in four different art museums. Although it doesn't go into much depth its a useful discussion of what's out there and how well it works. |
| Are art museums serving our targeted audiences? | A Museums and the Web paper by Holly Witchey. She discusses what children like about museum web sites and tests some out. The kids don't mince any words - "It's not even close to exciting...". |
Case studies |
| Trouble at Prada | A great article which tells the real story behind the hi-tech Prada shop in New York. As you might expect things didn't go quite as smoothly as their PR made out. Don't let this put you off - lots of projects go very well indeed but they're not so much fun to read about. |
| Creating the Secret Life of the Home gallery | Tim Hunkin created the Secret Life of the Home gallery in the Science Museum. Here he gives a wonderfully honest account of how he did it - what went well and what didn't. The gallery has almost no computer exhibits but this is a great account and well worth a read. |
Websites |
| Museums, Galleries and Digitisation - Current best practice and recommendations on measuring impact | Information from the Scottish Museums Council. Well written and useful. If you don't do anything else then read the recommendations on page 7 of the summary report. Although designed for web projects the advice is spookily similar to my documents about gallery exhibits - which is nice. |
| Good practice guide for developers of cultural heritage web services | This is a huge resource aimed at those developing on line "collections style" web sites. There's lots of good stuff here but I found it all a bit unfocused - it doesn't really address why you would want to develop a site like this and why visitors would want to use it. |
| Research based web design and usability guidelines from the US government | Once you've got past the pdf file format these are surprisingly well written guidelines on making web sites usable and accessible. |
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