Making Museums More Mobile

At what stage of an exhibition's development do you start to think about including digital content? Is it primarily a way to add movement & sound to a static collection of objects, or do you consider it integral to the design, presentation or functionality of an exhibition?

Digital elements such as downloadable content, interviews, social networking or games, can replace other traditional aspects of an exhibition to create a dramatically different look and feel.

With so many people carrying smart phones these days, mobile device tours are a new take on the traditional audio guided tour. I've often spoken about the suitablility of the Public Art Collection for this type of tour, well now there's an accessible mechanism to help us build one! The My Tours site lets you easily build your own mobile application for the public to download onto an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Whilst this doesn't cater for all visitors, a few iPod Touches could be made available for use within the exhibition space, with other visitors using their own device to navigate through an exhibition, or around our venues.

Caz has shown us some examples of Brooklyn Museums iPhone apps. The American Museum of Natural History have also developed one. Another site of interest discussed at a recent Culture Victoria forum on the topic of mobile tours includes this beautiful interactive soundscape developed for a sculpture park.

How social are you?

You may have noticed that we now have a sign in the 'Rock Chicks' exhibition to let people know they can leave a comment on the Arts Centre's Facebook page. While we are not exactly being deluged with comments I think it's a good first step to improving our social networking presence. All we have to do now is start engaging!

Social networking in a museum context has come a long way since 2008 when many of the bigger institutions in Australia starting developing their social media policies and in April next year we'll have a chance to hear from some of the pioneers of  'the first wave' at the Transformations in Cultural Communications Conference. The focus of the conference is on developing and supporting culturally diverse audiences and will feature speakers from the Smithsonian, Powerhouse, RMIT, MOV, ACMI and Australian Museum.

If you feel like you've missed the first wave entirely don't worry it's not that hard to catch up. A few people have asked me to re-post the details of the Licence 2 Test Drive site I mentioned way back in January. You may recall that it's an easy self-guided, six lesson course that will have you up to speed in no time. If you'd like any help getting started or you think it might be fun to do a few lessons as a group just let me know and I'll see what I can organise.