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Gabriel, sounds like a great project. We are trying to do more of this in our museum exhibits. The goal for our World War II exhibit, which opened last year, was to try to help visitors get a hint of what it was really like to be a soldier in World War II. We did this with about a dozen story boards, each of which described details from the life of a particular soldier from our town, and was often accompanied by artifacts that they wore or carried or brought home. A few of the stories came from first-person interviews, but most came from interviews with children of the veterans because they had already died. For two of the living vets and a female armory worker, we used short audio excerpts from their interviews and put them on QR codes to be read with smartphones or our museum tablet. Then we played WWII era music in the background -- either the morale-boosting "up" music or the heavy "Saving Private Ryan" soundtrack. One woman actually started to cry after reading some of the boards when the sad music was playing (and she wasn't even from our town), so I feel we were getting there!

The hard part is getting people to read the storyboards (even though the boards are attractive, and visual), or listen to the clips (which are short, and pretty dramatic). We pretty much still need a person to get the visitor engaged enough to start reading or listening to the clips -- or we start reading / paraphrasing the boards to them. Because the most common response it to look at the whole case and just move along...

Anyone have suggestions for getting them to stop without the intervention of a real person -- for when we can't be there?

--Kathie

Kathie Gow

Curator, Hatfield Historical Museum http://hatfieldhistory.weebly.com

Oral History Producer http://www.wordspicturesstories.com

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Gabriel Taylor <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I am a graduate student at IUPUI working on my master's in Museum Studies. I have been exploring ways for museums to enhance the experiences of our audiences through the use of object biographies that can give more of a personal story rather than stating facts about items. I am hoping to find that by focusing more on stories of objects, our visitors will develop an emotional connection to an object that we helped facilitate. By doing this, audiences can see a reflection of their own personal histories in museums and will know that we are representing communities and their interests rather than serving the interests only of museums.

In what ways do your various institutions try to connect with your audiences and local communities? I am interested in hearing about different public programs, uses of technology, public forums, artistic demonstrations, live interpretations, etc. What were your goals when you implemented different modalities and forms of object and story interpretation? Were they successful? In what ways are you using your collections with a purpose to serve the community rather than being institutions strictly of connoseurship?

I am researching this information for my object based learning course and I am hoping to continue with the information I gather for an independent study course for next semester. Ideally I would like to discover ways to facilitate audience discussion and relationships based on either similar or different emotional responses we are able to evoke through object interpretation.

Thanks for your time.

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