105. Building a Better Visitor Experience with Open Source Software

Thirty-seven years after the collapse of Bulgaria's communist regime, the country still doesn’t have an interpretive museum about the period. But even if one existed, I know Bulgarians who would never visit, confident that a museum of communism would be an endorsement of the regime. Political scientist Louisa Slavkova, founder of the Sofia Platform Foundation, is hoping to solve both problems with Facade, a new museum set to open in Sofia in 2028. The name points to the gap between the regime's promises and its human cost. In this episode, Slavkova describes how her team's work at the former Belene concentration camp gave them the confidence to build a museum, the first version of the museum inside a converted bus in time for Eurovision 2027, and how Facade will make room for a full range of Bulgarian’s memories without treating those memories as a verdict on the regime. Image: The building of the future Facade museum in Sofia, Bulgaria. Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Bulgaria's Missing Museum 00:57 Inside the Museum of Socialist Art 02:14 Louisa Slavkova and the Sofia Platform Foundation 03:27 After the Fall of Communism 04:57 Young Bulgarians and Secondhand Nostalgia 06:14 Histories from Belene 08:03 Teaching the History of Communism 08:58 From Belene to Facade 10:37 Making Room for Conflicting Memories 12:09 A Museum on Wheels for Eurovision 13:00 Inside the Museum Bus 15:13 When Museums Become Propaganda 16:36 Facade's Planned Opening 16:52 Outro | Join Club Archipelago DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast about how pop culture reflects the museum world back to us. Each episode is WAY longer than 15 minutes :) ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 114. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

Steel from the World Trade Center has spread to every corner of the U.S. When the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave away more than 1,800 pieces of steel saved from Ground Zero, and communities in all 50 states built them into memorials. A few were designed by famous architects, but most were welded by volunteers. Artist and researcher Sam Holleran first encountered the steel in a posting for a small-town public art commission. The listing described the steel in almost sacred terms and requested that the material be unaltered. Holleran and his brother Max, a sociologist, spent the next several years figuring out how the distribution of these relics turned the steel from the World Trade Center into a nationally dispersed collection of memorials. Their new book is called Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center. In this episode, Sam Holleran describes how archivists hand-picked the most "charismatic" pieces of bent steel from the pile at Ground Zero, why firefighters became the keepers of 9/11 memory, and what these 1,800 memorials might mean once the towers have been gone longer than they stood. Image: The 9/11 Memorial in Tallahassee, FL Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Berlin Wall Everywhere 00:54 Sam Holleran 02:22 WTC Steel After 9/11 03:44 Saving the Shrouds 05:29 Hangar 17 08:00 How Steel Was Distributed 09:47 Civic Spaces and Odd Sites 10:59 Tallahassee Memorial Story 12:37 Firefighters as Memory Keepers 14:03 What We Remember 15:12 25 Years Later 16:07 Visit Your Local Memorial 16:29 Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center 16:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 113. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast about how pop culture reflects the museum world back to us. Each episode is WAY longer than 15 minutes :) ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

It's 2099, and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high-security museum in Europe. One of the targets: the Kabwe skull, a roughly 300,000-year-old early human skull found in present-day Zambia in 1921. This is Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop, where your job is to steal back looted artifacts by mapping entrances and exits, positioning your crew, and making it past robot security using your parkour skills. Several things about this are unrealistic. For one, the actual Kabwe skull, currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might not need such an elaborate plan. But there is a damningly realistic fact at the heart of the game: every single one of the roughly 70 objects you steal was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western museum or private collection. And the way museums in the game wiggle out of a fictional treaty to return stolen artifacts doesn't sound fictional at all. It mirrors the real-world tactics that have kept the Kabwe skull in London for over a century, despite Zambia's repeated requests for its return. In this episode, Ben Myers, CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and Mohale Mashigo, the studio's narrative director, talk about why heists are the perfect genre for a game about repatriation, what they found when they visited the real artifacts in person, and why their video game often does a much better job telling the story of these objects than the museums that hold them. Image: The Kabwe skull as it appears in a Relooted heist briefing. Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Relooted 01:30 "We overstated the security capabilities on museums" 01:45 Meet Ben Myers 02:50 Meet Mohale Mashigo 03:04 The Kabwe Skull 04:45 Labels and Missing Context in Museums 06:08 A Digital Museum 06:53 Treaties and Red Tape 09:37 Prosperous Future Africa 12:05 Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum on Episode 39 12:16 Museum of Black Civilizations 14:50 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 112. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast about how pop culture reflects the museum world back to us. Each episode is WAY longer than 15 minutes :) ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

Museums today are filled with software, yet they've largely avoided being "eaten" by the tech industry. Unlike music or movies, exhibitions can't be downloaded or scaled infinitely. There's only one Mona Lisa. But if the wrong platform finds the right leverage, that immunity may not last. Which is why the kind of software museums choose matters. TilBuci is a free, open-source tool used by museums to build touchscreens, kiosks, and projections. It was created by Brazilian software developer Lucas Junqueira after watching too many digital exhibitions quietly break down once the opening buzz faded. Designed to be usable by museum staff long after developers leave, TilBuci treats software not as a product, but as infrastructure. In this episode, Lucas Junqueira talks about what it takes to build museum software that lasts. Through the story of a projection still running on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum in Belo Horizonte over a decade after it opened, we explore how open, locally controlled tools extend the life of museum systems, and what's at stake if a tech platform ever inserts itself between museums and their audiences. Image: A projection animates the façade of the Espaço do Conhecimento (Space of Knowledge) museum at Praça da Liberdade (Liberty Square) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lucas Junqueira's software Managana, a previous version of TilBuci is running the projection. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Rise of Software in Museums 00:56 Software Eating the World 02:19 Why Are Museums Different? 03:16 Lucas Junqueira and TilBuci 05:09 Challenges and Innovations 08:09 The Flash Apocalypse 10:12 What's at Stake 11:48 Jurassic Park on Club Archipelago 13:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 111. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. 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 and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

For the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The plane was restored to be part of a full exhibit, presented alongside context about the atomic bombing's mass civilian casualties. But that exhibit never opened. Instead, after years of script revisions and intense pressure from veterans' groups and Congress, the museum displayed the restored bomber's fuselage with minimal interpretation. The exhibit was primarily dedicated to the technical process of restoring the aircraft; as one visitor noted, "I learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but I did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb." In this episode, historian Gregg Herken, who served as Chairman of the museum's Space History Division during the controversy, recounts how the exhibit went from reckoning with the bomb's full impact to re-enforcing a patriotic narrative. He recalls the specific moments that led up to one of the museum industry's cautionary tales, like when the director agreed to remove evocative artifacts like a schoolgirl's carbonized lunchbox from Hiroshima from the exhibition plans, and how the Air Force Association demanded the exhibit say the bombing saved 1 million American lives and other assertions that have been challenged by generations of historians. Today, a new presidential executive order dictates how the Smithsonian interprets American history. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Enola Gay in the 1980s 01:07 Gregg Herken 02:21 Initial Planning 02:40 Martin Harwit 03:48 Herken's Visit to Hiroshima 04:39 'The Lunchbox' 05:32 Initial Exhibit Script 06:26 Opposition and Controversy 07:15 Revisions and Criticisms 10:49 Air Force Association's Demands 11:59 Exhibit Cancellation 13:37 "Pale Shadow" 14:10 Reflecting on History and Censorship 20:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 110. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. 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 and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

For the last few decades of the 20th century, if you visited Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, you could have been serenaded by a barbershop quartet of audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders as framed on U.S. currency. This was one of the many exhibits at Enterprise Square, USA, a high-tech museum dedicated to teaching children about Free Market Economics. The museum, which found itself out of money almost before it opened, shut down in 1999. Barrett Huddleston first encountered these exhibits as a wide-eyed elementary school student in the 1980s, mesmerized by the talking puppets, giant electronic heads, and interactive displays that taught how regulation stifled freedom. Years later, he returned as a tour guide during the museum's final days, maintaining those same animatronics with duct tape and wire cutters, and occasionally being squeezed inside the two-dollar bill to repair Thomas Jefferson. He joins us to explore this collision of education, ideology, and visitor experience, and how the former museum shapes his own approach to teaching children today. Cover Image: Children watch audio-animatronic portraits of America's founders, as framed on U.S. currency, sing a song about freedom. [Photograph 2012.201.B0957.0912] hosted by The Gateway to Oklahoma History Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Buzludzha Again 00:46 Enterprise Square, USA 01:32  Barrett Huddleston 02:05 The Origins and Purpose of Enterprise Square 03:09 The Boom and Bust of Oklahoma's Economy 05:47 The Disney Connection and Animatronics 07:54 The Decline of Enterprise Square 11:42 Huddleston's Reflections on Education 13:41 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 109. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. 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 and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant. The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence. The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences. Image: Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka welcome visitors in this former kindergarten. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Post-War Germany and the GDR's Vision 00:59 The Planned City of Eisenhüttenstadt 3:00 Andrea Wieloch 03:15 The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life 03:56 Daily Life in the GDR 07:35 GDR History in modern Germany 14:43 Future Plans for the Museum 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 108. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. 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 and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology. While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust. Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Auction of the U.S. Constitution 00:43 Constitution DAO 01:36 The Role of Governance Tokens 02:02 Nik Honeysett 02:45 Balboa Park Online Collaborative 04:29 Museums and Crypto 05:24 Blockchain and Provenance 07:40 Smart Contracts and Museum Governance 09:56 The Outcome of the Auction 11:58 Museums as Trustworthy 14:00 Museum Archipelago Ep. 39. Hans Sloane And The Origins Of The British Museum With James Delbourgo 16:41 Conclusion and Future of Crypto in Museums 17:44 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. Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 107. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. 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 and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

I remember visiting – and loving – The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) as a child. Opened in 1965, it’s an immersive space with cobblestone streets and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering into a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures. And I’m not the only one with fond memories. When the museum announced that the exhibit would not move over to the planned new museum down the street, the public reacted negatively. Dr. Ellen Censky, president and CEO of the MPM, describes the reasons why the museum can’t – and most interestingly shouldn’t – move The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. It’s a story involving cherished memories, the distinction between collections and exhibits which isn’t always at the top of visitors’ minds, and public trust. In this episode, we explore why the Milwaukee Public Museum decided to move (it’s the fourth relocation in its history) and Milwaukee Revealed, the planned new immersive gallery that will be the spiritual successor to The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which will cover a much larger swath of the city’s history. Plus, we get into the meta question of whether museums are outside of the history they are tasked with preserving. Image: Bartender in Streets of Old Milwaukee at Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo by Flickr user JeffChristiansen Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s 2015 Renovation 01:17 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s Visitor Experience 03:40 Dr. Ellen Censky, President and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum 04:10 The Decision to Move the Museum 04:45 AAM Accreditation 06:21 The Current Museum 07:42 Funding the New Museum 08:55 Milwaukee Revealed 11:14 Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11th, 2023 11:40 The distinction between collections and exhibits 12:45 “We owe future museum goers the opportunity to see something different” 13:44 Local Talk Radio Coverage 14:07 Museum Designers 15:29 Closing Thoughts and the “Next Best Thing” 17:00 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. Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 106. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. 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 and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling, knowing you're helping make this show possible.

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. Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 105. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. 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.