105. Building a Better Visitor Experience with Open Source Software Museum Archipelago

While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg recognized the institution's limited capacity to develop new digitals exhibits with the proprietary solutions that are common in big museums. This challenge led Rehnberg to start work on Exhibitera, a free, open-source suite of software tools tailored for museum exhibit control that took advantage of the touch screens and computers that the museum already had.


Today, as Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Rehnberg continues to refine and expand Exhibitera, which he previously called Constellation. The software is crafted to enable institutions to independently create, manage, and update their interactive exhibits, even between infrequent retrofits. The overarching goal is to make sure that smaller museum’s aren’t “left in the 20th century” or reliant on costly bespoke interactive software solutions.


Exhibitera is used in Fort Worth and Nashville and available to download. In this episode, Rehnberg shares his journey of creating Exhibitera to tackle his own issues, only to discover its broader applicability to numerous museums.


Image: Screenshot from a gallery control panel in Exhibitera


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Computer Interactives in Museums
01:00 Dr. Morgan Rehnberg
01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini
02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville
03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums
05:00 Solving Your Own Problems
06:30 Exhibitera
07:45 “A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit”
08:30 Built-In Multi-Language Support
09:30 Open Source Exhibit Management
10:30 Why Open Source?
12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum
13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 105. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.





View Transcript



Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


I’ve spent most of my career building interactive exhibits for museums. These are all visitor-facing: touchscreens for pulling up information or playing games based on the science content, projection walls for displaying moving infographics, and digital signage for rotating through ticket prices or special events.



Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Well I think most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad. And I don't think that's because they were necessarily bad when they were first installed, but major exhibitions can last for 10, 15, 50 years, and it's often quite difficult to go back and retrofit and improve something like technology as time goes on.



This is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg, Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. Rehnberg offers that long-term maintenance is the reason most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad – and that is kindly letting us programmers off