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How RFID is Making Museums Enchanting

How RFID is Making Museums Enchanting

Museum designers have been working hard to change the musty, dusty reputation of museums, and RFID is helping with innovative applications. No longer is the hands-off “Night at the Museum” look the standard for U.S. museums. To attract new patrons, museums are bringing advanced technology to bear, including VR and RFID.

RFID in particular has been easy to adapt for new creative purposes. Many museums already use RFID to manage their collections, affixing unobtrusive RFID tags to art and artifacts. Doorway readers record when items are moved, whether from storage to exhibit, or from one room to another. Curators can check inventories as simply as walking into a room with an RFID scanner. Tags can be programmed to store a variety of data about the object: name, age, and collection information; restoration status; climatic requirements; maintenance schedule; and much more.

But beyond inventory management, RFID offers opportunities for interactive, immersive experiences for museum patrons. Some creative RFID applications:

  • Washington, D.C.’s International Spy Museum uses RFID-enabled badges to let visitors take on a spy’s persona. Visitors test their espionage skills as the spy of their choice, and receive an online “debriefing” after their visit.
  • Touring exhibit “The Science of Survival” allows visitors to make lifestyle choices in various sectors of the exhibit (transport, building, food and drink), collecting their answers via RFID entry badges. The results are compiled to forecast the future environmental impact of those choices in the year 2050.
  • At the O2 in London, visitors at the British Music Experience “collect” their favorite items on museum-issued RFID cards. In-depth information about their favorites is then sent to them in a follow-up email.
  • Visitors to the Horsens Prison Museum in Denmark can choose a specific guard or inmate to learn about – for example, a prisoner who escaped by digging a 59-foot tunnel. Visitors’ RFID badges activate videos and images related to each visitor’s particular subject, for a customized experience.

From museum managers’ point of view, RFID ‘s enhanced visitor experience helps to define and reinforce the museum’s brand, build visitor loyalty, and create publicity opportunities. From the museum patrons’ perspective, RFID creates a visitor experience that is far more personalized and immersive than the old-school museum walk-through. It’s fascinating, it’s imaginative, and most important, it’s just plain fun!

 

Photo © Maria / AdobeStock

The Surprising Statistics of U.S. Collecting Institutions

The Surprising Statistics of U.S. Collecting Institutions

No one can doubt the value of museums and libraries. These institutions are the repositories of our collective cultural memories, preserving history via written word and artifact, helping us find our way forward by knowing where we came from. And our U.S. collecting institutions – libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and scientific collections – have created truly remarkable assemblages, according to the recently released results of the Heritage Health Information Survey:

  • The U.S. is home to more than 31,000 collecting institutions.
  • More than 13 billion items, from artworks to arrowheads, are preserved in these institutions.
  • Of those 13 billion items, many are in the form of individual paper documents, enough to fill 347 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Given these astonishing numbers, it’s no surprise that proper storage is vital for these collecting institutions. Museums and archives in particular put much of their effort into the conservation of their unique collections. They need storage that not only accommodates all the unusual sizes and shapes of artifacts, but preserves objects from further deterioration. Humidity and chemically-incompatible surfaces are damaging to any ancient artifact, and those Olympic pools of paper documents are especially prone to insect damage as well.

Luckily, storage providers have already anticipated the needs of collecting institutions, designing an array of space-saving, customizable, and protective systems. Adjustable shelving and partitioned drawers and bins fit artifacts both large and small. Flat files are well-suited to paper documents and unframed photos and paintings, while vertical racks hold framed artworks. These museum-friendly storage systems have non-reactive finishes and are sturdy enough for the heavy weight of stone sculptures or military ordinance.

Museums are chronically challenged to find enough exhibit space for their treasures, but a well-designed storage system can transform storage space into additional exhibit space. A high-density mobile storage system can save up to 50% of floor space, and a vertical storage carousel or a multi-level shelving system saves up to 80% of floor space.

Keeping track of all those objects can be a challenge, too. A written tracking system is time-consuming and often inaccurate. A bar code system is better, but it becomes ineffective if bar codes are obscured or damaged. An RFID system, with inconspicuous RFID tags that communicate with an RFID inventory reader, allows museum managers to track an object as it moves from storage to conservation room to exhibit room.

The work of U.S. collecting institutions is too important to trust to outmoded storage methods. With the help of an experienced storage consultant, conservators can look after their collections properly, now and in the future, as their collections grow far beyond the current numbers.

 

Photo © caftor / AdobeStock

Storage Challenge: Truly Unusual Museums

Storage Challenge: Truly Unusual Museums

Museums typically fall into a few well-known categories: art, science, and history. But there are some museums specializing in genuinely obscure collections. The Travel Channel’s online magazine offers a selection of some of the most unusual, including:

  • A circus museum
  • A firefighting museum
  • A museum of garbage
  • A spy museum
  • A Pez dispenser museum
  • A museum of bad art

These museums all share one thing in common – as well as creating a roster of ever-changing exhibits, they have to safely store all the fascinating items that aren’t on display. A well-designed high-density storage system is often the best solution for storing the wide variety of shapes and sizes of a museum’s overflow collections. See below how one museum solved their storage problem, then let us know about your strange-storage story.

Photo © Vladimir Wrangel – Fotolia

The Museum Collection Without A Museum: The Center of Military History

The Museum Collection Without A Museum: The Center of Military History

In an obscure corner of Virginia’s Ft. Belvoir is a secure climate-controlled warehouse filled with the U.S. Army’s accumulated treasure of museum-quality military artifacts. Aisle after aisle of mobile high-density storage cabinets are filled with historic weaponry. Rows of air-tight cabinets contain thousands of uniforms and insignia, antique and modern. Rack after rack of rolling frames support 16,000 works of art, with soldiers’ paintings hanging beside one-of-a-kind Norman Rockwells. The collection is a military history buff’s fantasy, carefully preserved and thoroughly catalogued. And other than its curators, no one ever sees it – because there’s no museum to exhibit these extraordinary artifacts.

A museum is in fact in the works, but today it exists only on paper. The Army Historical Foundation is raising money to build the museum, called The Center of Military History, and they’ve raised $76 million of the $175 million needed to bring the vision into reality. In the meantime, the treasures remain safe – and hidden – in state-of-the-art storage. Read the full story here: http://bzfd.it/1tdRpdL.

Photo © Aliven – Fotolia