Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
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.
Gallery Continues 🎒
The free availability of tools like Exhibitera might have been predicted at the first museum technology conference in 1968. This event, titled “Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums”, foresaw the transformative impact of computers on museums—from digital artifacts to creating interactive exhibits to expanding audience reach beyond physical boundaries. Most of all, speakers understood that museum technologists would need to “join forces” with each other to learn and experiment better ways to use computers in museum settings.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿 Toy Story 2 (1999)
After spending the first movie accepting the possibility that he might have to share his kid's love, Woody discovers he is a valuable collectible from a once-popular TV show and faces the possibility of being of being preserved forever in a museum.
The dramatic tension of the movie only works if the decision to go to the Konishi Toy Museum feels like a believable option — an eternity of “watching kids from behind glass and never be loved again” or a few years of being played with before inevitably being discarded.
Join Joe Murphy, host of the excellent Uncultured Universe Podcast, and me as we dive deep into the existential museum themes of this flawless film.