105. Building a Better Visitor Experience with Open Source Software

While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg (https://www.morganrehnberg.com) 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 (https://exhibitera.org), 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 (https://www.morganrehnberg.com) 01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens) 02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville (https://www.adventuresci.org) 03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/103) 05:00 Solving Your Own Problems 06:30 Exhibitera (https://github.com/Cosmic-Chatter/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 (https://github.com/Cosmic-Chatter/Exhibitera) 10:30 Why Open Source? 12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum (https://cosmicchatter.org/constellation/tutorials.html) 13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club/) Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE), or even email (https://museum.substack.com/) to never miss an episode.

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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.

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