Crystal time at the Australian Museum

The Australian Museum has a new entrance, built in double quick time by its dynamic new director Kim McKay.

Named the 'Crystal Hall' for reasons of both its design and its ability to house the Museum's outstanding collection of crystals, it was opened last week by the Premier of NSW. Interestingly, this is where the entrance was always meant to be, instead of the slightly awkward entrance from College Street, which has been the way in for the last 150 years. And to emphasize this, the Museum has changed its street address to No 1 William Street - neat marketing.

The Australian Museum's new Crystal Hall entrance

The closure of the College Street entrance has allowed the realisation of the original concept for the entrance area, namely as a major gallery. And the result is spectacular, with truly one of the great internal public spaces in Sydney revealed as it was originally intended. For years this space has been a mixture of cafe, shop and entrance way, dominated by the blue whale skeleton to remind visitors this is predominantly a natural history museum.

The blue whale remains but now beneath it is the new 'Wild Planet' exhibition displaying the Museum's taxidermy collection with specimens large and small. My favourite exhibition on this theme is the Paris Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle's 'Gallery of Evolution', which first kicked off the concept of using stuffed animals in an artistic rather than wholly naturalistic way, though I also love the Melbourne Museum's 'Amazing Animals'. 

This is however a beautifully presented exhibition and space helped by two spectacular vault ceilinged glass cases (vitrines for the initiated) made by the doyen of such creations, Goppion of Milan. 

Take a walk on the wild side and enjoy a buzzing museum.

The future of museums according to the ABC

It’s good to see the subject of the future of museums getting some airtime on the ABC on 3rd September.

Frank Howarth, director of the Australian Museum, Louise Douglas from the National Museum of Australia and Angelina Russo from Swinburne University form a forum to discuss where museums are at and going to. It’s all good stuff, mainly talking about the close interaction between real and virtual audiences these days. It’s something that Frank has been an advocate for some time, and given he is a highly articulate speaker, he has become a bit of an international star on this front. Certainly the Australian Museum is looking good virtually (21 million visits of at least 4 minutes to their web site last year) compared to over 300,000 live visits. The ongoing question is how you link the virtual visitor to the real experience.

Louise started life at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney where I worked with her in the 1980s. It was a fabulous time to be there as the project was well funded, all sorts of new ways were being developed for planning exhibitions, there was an exciting new building going up, and we all felt the world was our oyster. In reality the Powerhouse project was truly a catalyst in the redevelopment of a number of major museums in the region – I think particularly of the Melbourne Museum and Te Papa in Wellington - and Powerhouse employees are to be found in almost every major museum in the land. However the building is now seen to suffer from some significant design faults, the most obvious being the lack of a major temporary exhibition space and an entrance that faces the wrong way, i.e. it needs a Darling Harbour front door.

Angelina is Associate Professor in the Design faculty at Swinburne specializing in museum communication. She pops up regularly in anything to do with social media and the web, and was a significant player at this year’s Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis. I always find her contribution to be articulate and to the point. So whilst I don’t think much new comes up in the program, it is a useful summary of where a major aspect of museology thinking is at, and I suspect a bit of a revelation to wider audiences.

RFIDs and the Museum sector

RFID use in museums was the subject of an interesting paper at Museums and the Web 2009.

Basically RFIDs are being explored for use in two broad applications at present in museums, one being content delivery for visitors, the other being asset tracking of objects. We are pursuing the latter route with Smarttrack, which we have established to provide software and hardware solutions in this area. RFIDs provide significant benefits over bar codes as they do not require line of sight for reading, can hold a lot more data, and will allow automatic tracking and finding of objects.

The other opportunity is in providing content to visitors, principally through providing them with access to collection information on their PDAs read from a RFID.
This paper by Tim Baldwin at the University of Melbourne combined both uses, detailing a project run at the Melbourne Museum. Passive RFID tags were given to visitors and they were asked to have them read at certain points around the exhibition, thus recording what they visited. The idea is this can then provide the opportunity to enhance museum visits through personalising information, such as profiling the visitor to make recommendations for future activity at the museum.

My view is that the way forward is not to make it too complicated. The green fields opportunities for the use of RFIDs in museums are enormous, but let’s get them up and running in tried and tested areas before we try and push the technology too far, and risk alienating key stakeholders, such as collection managers, before the technology is proven in these new areas.