Museum Archipelago 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.


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
01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini
02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville
03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums
05:00 Solving Your Own Problems
06:30 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
10:30 Why Open Source?
12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum
13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.



Support Museum Archipelago🏖️


Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:
Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.









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.





View Transcript



Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


I’ve spent most of my career building interactive exhibits for museums. These are all visitor-facing: touchscreens for pulling up information or playing games based on the science content, projection walls for displaying moving infographics, and digital signage for rotating through ticket prices or special events.



Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Well I think most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad. And I don't think that's because they were necessarily bad when they were first installed, but major exhibitions can last for 10, 15, 50 years, and it's often quite difficult to go back and retrofit and improve something like technology as time goes on.



This is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg, Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. Rehnberg offers that long-term maintenance is the reason most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad – and that is kindly letting us programmers off

The Murney Tower Museum in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits.


Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor has dedicated her studies to understanding the unique dynamics and challenges faced by small museums, and is also the Murney Tower Museum’s sole full-time employee.


In this episode, Dr. Erdogan-O'Connor describes the operation of The Murney Tower Museum, discusses the economic models of small museums, and muses on what small museums can teach larger ones.


Image: Murney Tower Museum


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Understanding the Landscape of Small Museums
02:38 Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor
03:00 Murney Tower Museum
08:29 Overcoming Challenges with Digital Solutions
09:46 What Big Institutions Can Learn from Small Museums
09:54 The Power of Local Connections in Small Museums
13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.



Support Museum Archipelago🏖️


Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:
Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.









Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 104. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.





View Transcript



Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner.


Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


Let’s say you sorted every museum on earth in order by the number of yearly visitors.


At one end, with yearly visitor numbers in the millions, would be large, recognizable institutions – places like the British Museum in London. There’s a cluster of these big institutions, but as you go further along the ordered list of museums, the visitor numbers start to drop.


At some point during these declining visitor numbers, you reach small museums. Exactly where in the order you first reach a small museum doesn’t really matter – one definition of small museums from the American Association of State and Local History is simply: “If you think you’re small, you’re small.” You could do the same sort by number of staff members or by operating budget – the effect would be more or less the same. The point is that once you reach the threshold where small museums begin, you still have the vast, vast majority of museums to go.



Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: You just realize how many small museums are there in the world. Unbelievable numbers, right? They're everywhere and they hold such an important space in local cultural landscapes. Even if I dare to say more than large institutions.



The sorting exercise illustrates a long tail effect – each small museum, while attracting fewer visitors individually, collectively hosts an enormous number of visitors. There’s just so many of them. The long tail effect was coined in 2004 to describe economics on the internet: the new ab

Computing work keeps museums running, but it’s largely invisible. That is, unless something goes wrong. For Dr. Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and his colleague Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes activities of museum technology workers was one of the main reasons to start the Oral Histories of Museum Computing project.


The first museum technology conference was hosted in 1968 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This prescient event, titled “Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums” was mostly focused on the cutting edge: better inventory management systems using computers instead of paper methods. However, it also 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.


The Oral Histories of Museum Computing project collects the stories of what happened since that first museum technology conference, identifying the key historical themes, trends, and people behind the machines behind the museums. In this episode, Paul Marty and Kathy Jones describe their experience as museum technology professionals, the importance of conferences like the Museum Computer Network, and the benefits of compiling and sharing these oral histories.


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums
00:43 Thomas P. F. Hoving Closing Statements
01:41 Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University
02:11 Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School
02:18 Museum Computing from There to Here
04:08 The First Steps of Museum Computing
04:52 Early Challenges in Museum Databases Like GRIPHOS
07:00 Changing Field, Changing Profession
08:48 The Oral Histories of Museum Computing Project
11:32 Reflecting on the Journey of Museum Technology
14:12 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.



Support Museum Archipelago🏖️


Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:
Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.









Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 103. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.





View Transcript




On April 17th, 1968, less than two weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the first computer museum conference was coming to a close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.


This conference was hosted by the recently-formed Museum Computer Network, and had a hopeful, descriptive title: A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums.


At the closing dinner, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving acknowledged that “for some these three days have an unsettling effect” and that “these machines are going to put us on our toes as never

On Berlin’s Museum Island, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago.


Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun has heard a range of negative visitor reactions to this copy — from disappointment to feeling tricked — and engages visitors to think more deeply about copies. As an archeologist and art historian, Durgun is fascinated by the cultural attitude and history of copies: the stories they tell about their creators’ values, how they can be used to keep original objects in situ, and their role in repatriation or restitution cases.


In this episode, Durgun describes the ways that museum visitors’ perception of authenticity has changed over time, how replicas jump-started museum collections in the late 19th-century, and some of the ethical implications of copies in museums.


Image: Reconstructed Lion Sculpture Sam'al near modern Zincirli Höyük, Turkey 10th-8th century BCE by Mary Harrsch


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Sam’al/Zincirli Lions
01:09 Pinar Durgun
01:22 Museum Island
01:40 Find Divison
02:28 Gipsformerei
03:12 Replicas Jump-Started Museum Collections
04:35 Trending Away from Copies
05:27 When Visitors Feel Tricked
06:00 When Visitors Are Okay With Copies
07:28 Ancient Cultural Contexts About Copies
08:07 Hokusai’s Great Wave
08:35 “Immersive Experiences” Made Up of Digital Copies
09:08 Digital Copies
12:39 Museum Archipelago 97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does.
13:32 How Should Museums Present Copies in Their Collections?
14:36 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.



Support Museum Archipelago🏖️


Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:
Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.










Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 102. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




View Transcript



Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


On the Museum Island in Berlin, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE. And one is a plaster copy carved a bit over 100 years ago.



Pinar Durgun:  When you see these lions, you cannot tell the difference which one is a copy, which one is original.



And lately, curator Pinar Durgun has been wondering how visitors feel about that copy.



Pinar Durgun: But when I tell visitors, this one is a copy. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about a copy being here? Do you feel like you've been tricked?


Pinar Durgun: And if I ask a question like this, they say yes. They say, I don't like copies.



Durgun works at the Pergamon Museum, where those Gate lions from Samʼal are now perched -- well, some of them.



Pinar Durgun: My name is Pi

Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration.


But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation.


But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.


In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform.


Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience.
01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains”
02:40 The Original Visitor Experience
03:02 Dora Ivanova
03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47
03:35 Entering the Building
04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof
05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves
06:25 The Inner Mosaics
07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show
08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation
09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation
10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform
11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built
12:30 Acting before memory becomes history
13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary
14:05 The Panoramic Corridor
15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society
16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum
17:20 The preservation as proof of change
18:05 “Buzludzha is about change”
19:15 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.



Support Museum Archipelago🏖️


Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:
Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.










Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 101. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




View Transcript



Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


Buzludzha has always

In the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum.


As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name?


And while the museum had a website and a map, there was no way to directly contact them. Years went by as the realization sank in—the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview.


So, for this very special 100th episode, I went to Finland and and visited the Rönnäs
Archipelago Museum.


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Why is Ian in Finland?
00:45 Museum Archipelago's Early Days
01:30 Same Name
03:14 Arriving at the Archipelago Museum
04:05 Naomi Nordstedti
04:30 Life on the Archipelago
06:04 Opening the Museum
06:54 Boats
07:55 The Archipelago During Prohibition
08:28 Thoughts About 100 Episodes
10:40 Thanks For Listening
10:54 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖


Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.



Support Museum Archipelago🏖️


Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:
Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.










Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 100. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




View Transcript



Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


This is episode 100 of Museum Archipelago, and I’m in a rental car 80 kilometers outside of Helsinki, Finland looking for a museum.



Field Audio - GPS: “In 400 meters, turn left onto the ramp”.


Field Audio - Ian: “I think… I can feel we are close to the Gulf of Finland”



But not just any museum. I’m deep in rural Finland because of the name of this podcast: Museum Archipelago.



Field Audio - Ian: “You know, I hope the museum has a bathroom…”



When I was starting this project and choosing a name, I hoped to create an audio lens to look at museums as a medium, and to critically examine museums as a whole. If no museum was an island, I reasoned, why not name the show after another geographic feature – a collection of islands?


And I enjoyed the symmetry with Gulag Archipelago – just a slight sinister undertone that this won’t be a fluffy museum podcast. And when I came across the quote by philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”, the name stuck.


Museum Archipelago was snappy and a great name for a podcast – there was just one problem: the Archipelago Museum, located somewhere in Finland.



Field Audio - Ian: “Ah, I see a sign for the museum, but I can't pronounce it – ”


Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left”



For the first 20 or so episodes of the show, every time you searched the words Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top results would be about the Archipelago Museum in Finland, i