Museums and Heritage Show

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I went to the Museums and Heritage show on Wednesday. They claimed it was the biggest ever, and it was in a new venue, the West Hall, Olympia. When I used to exhibit, it was at the Royal Horticultural Society New Hall, near Victoria, Olympia is a little more out-of-the-way, with no direct tube service on weekdays (or if the the show is big enough, which M&H isn’t of course). If my train into London had stopped a Clapham Junction, there would have been a very quick Overground journey to Olympia, but it didn’t so I had to take the tube to Earls Court, and then a bus and a walk to Olympia.

Once there, the “out-of-the-way- ness” continues, as the entrance to West Hall is about as far from any of the main roads as its possible to be. Inside though, the hall was a comfortable size for the show, which had felt a little drowned by space in the Earls Court venue in recent years.

There were the usual stands from industry stalwarts: organisations like the AHI and GEM, exhibition designers like PLB and Hayley Sharpe; vitrine systems from the likes of ClickNetherfield and Conversation by Design, and all the retail product suppliers. But this year was all about the apps – stick a pin in the exhibition plan, and chances are, the stall you pick will be selling an app, or at the very least “a mobile web service that looks just like at app to your visitors.”  It’s the start-ups though, like Huntzz, which I feel sorry for. They think they’re bringing something new to the market, but I wonder what they felt as they walked around the other exhibitors, realizing that their USP isn’t as unique as they thought, and in fact their product isn’t very good either. To be fair, they have apparently sold to a number of clients, including Chatsworth, but I can’t see them surviving in the long term. ATS were one of the first on the app scene, and they took a sensible approach, using a combination of app and bulk-bought iPods to undercut the costs of proprietary audio guide systems. Now the big boys like Acoustiguide and the even bigger Antenna will sell you apps too, though I bet you’ll still get better value from some of the smaller companies.

Apps haven’t killed off proprietary audio hardware though. The trend in hardware is about small solid-state devices with simple interfaces for locative or interactive content. The DiscoveryPEN for example, reads barely visible micro-barcodes, others are activated by Infra-Red, or RFID. The GuideID collects information on the the visitor as well as providing interpretation, but no-one seems to be using visitor information to adapt content to better engage that individual.

There were two highlights of the show for me.

One is a lovely piece of tech that I had a application for as soon as I saw it. The info-point is a tiny self-contained wifi webserver, with a content management system. Load your interpretation text, pictures and video on to it, plug it in and leave it. Tell visitors to point their smartphone browser at it, and it will serve them the content you want, without using their data allowance, or requiring connection to your network. If it falls over for any reason, it reboots itself automatically. Its basically a Raspberry Pi, with a wifi dongle, and some open source software, so you could probably build one yourself for less than a hundred quid. But not everyone has the technical knowhow to do that, and it would take time, so for many sites, an off the self solution like this is well worth the investment. I emailed one of the properties I work with from the stand, because I knew this is just what they need.

The other exciting thing is Storyscope, the product of an EU funded research programme called decipher. Its a server based system that enables heritage professionals to work collaboratively on papers, guidebooks, exhibitions – both virtual and in the real world, and even, dare I say it, apps. Start with your collection: build your story, adding items from other collections as you go; pull in data from collections management systems; add your narrative; share you working; add stories from other professional and the public; edit it, and publish. And the system records every step, so there’s a record of every decision, and the links back to the CMS systems at your and other institutions. I’m involved in a project at the NT right now that would really benefit from a tool like this.

Oh, and one more thing, not a highlight exactly but a nice touch. I’ve had used roller banners more often than I care to remember. They are a necessary evil. The green printers, Seacourt, were showing a nice looking bamboo banner stand, and even the banner itself is made from bamboo fibre.


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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