Open Forum

I work in a historic corporate museum/heritage center. In historic museums, what is customary (if anything) regarding changing or updating your exhibits? We are brand new, having opened in April 2015. We have already added two exhibits since opening. We have ushered all of the company employees through on Employee Tours (2700 of them!), so nearly everyone has seen it at least once. We did a survey with the employees as they came through, and the main "complaint" (if you can call it that) was that they wanted to be able to spend more time looking than the guided tours allowed them. We are now open with weekly employee hours, which will allow them to come back and do a self-guided tour and take as much time as they like. We designed the exhibits to include videos and digital tablets that they can scroll through for much more content than would fit on walls and in vitrines, so there is much to look at right from the start. I'm wondering how long I should wait to change exhibits and add content to the digital displays.

What would your institution do?

Thanks!

Joe

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Joseph Popp
Exhibits & Archives Specialist
Erie Insurance Heritage Center
Erie PA
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------Original Message------

I work in a historic corporate museum/heritage center. In historic museums, what is customary (if anything) regarding changing or updating your exhibits? We are brand new, having opened in April 2015. We have already added two exhibits since opening. We have ushered all of the company employees through on Employee Tours (2700 of them!), so nearly everyone has seen it at least once. We did a survey with the employees as they came through, and the main "complaint" (if you can call it that) was that they wanted to be able to spend more time looking than the guided tours allowed them. We are now open with weekly employee hours, which will allow them to come back and do a self-guided tour and take as much time as they like. We designed the exhibits to include videos and digital tablets that they can scroll through for much more content than would fit on walls and in vitrines, so there is much to look at right from the start. I'm wondering how long I should wait to change exhibits and add content to the digital displays.

What would your institution do?

Thanks!

Joe

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Joseph Popp
Exhibits & Archives Specialist
Erie Insurance Heritage Center
Erie PA
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Hi Joe:

We just recently finished a major expansion project that revamped our original main gallery, added two permanent exhibit galleries and one traveling exhibit gallery.  I believe the plan for completely redoing the permanent galleries is 10 years or more, but we're talking about 20,000+ square feet of gallery space and thousands of artifacts, so it's a very large undertaking. We have everything from cars to the dinosaur skeletons up there! Getting the exhibit furniture in and the artifacts installed took over a year on the last go around. Before the expansion, the staff would add/switch certain exhibit components and artifacts out every few years and I'm sure that will happen on some sort of scale with the new galleries, but it will be awhile before we completely redesign the galleries again.

In the 15 months we've been reopened, we've had two shows through the traveling exhibit gallery. We also have four large hallway cases that will be changed out every few years.  So even though our main galleries won't be revamped for awhile, we do have the traveling exhibit gallery and our hallways cases that change out regularly.

I think it strikes a bit of a balance.  I hope you find something that works well for you!

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Geoffrey Woodcox
Assistant Curator of Collections
State Historical Society of North Dakota
Bismarck ND

We are a small museum with a 59 year history.  It has only been in the past two years that we began a regular program of temporary exhibits.  They have been a huge success, especially with our local community that had little reason to frequent the museum otherwise.  We changed the exhibit three times per year.  With a staff of 2.5 employees, that schedule did become overwhelming.  We are in the process of building a new museum right now, and are including a temporary gallery.  However, we are working with our designer to construct a space with semi-flexible exhibit infrastructure in place.  This way, when rotating exhibits, we can switch out content without having to re-imagine and reconstruct the entire space each time.  The new approach should decrease the impact of producing temporary exhibits on staff while also decreasing the amount of time that we have to close the temporary gallery for the change to occur.  We are opening the new museum with a two temporary exhibits per year schedule.   

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Kristy Griffin
Curator of Collections & Exhibits
Sitka Historical Society
Sitka AK

Great question. In my experience, there's no hard-and-fast rule about when to change out your permanent exhibits. Ours have been up since 1997, and are holding up very well, which I admit is unusual (but see technology note below). Every two years we do a temporary exhibit in our 6,000 sq ft changing gallery.

The one exception is the bolt-on technology we've got in our permanent exhibits. We often update the content with either new info, info presented in a different way, or adding more for people to explore. An example of the latter are our digital scrapbooks, which enable people to flip through captioned pictures about all facets of the Pacific War. We also pay close attention to the hardware for obsolescence issues.

Hope this helps.

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Christopher Kolakowski
Director
MacArthur Memorial
Norfolk VA

Original Message:
Sent: 01-29-2016 02:25 PM
From: Kristy Griffin
Subject: How often do you change your historic museum exhibits?

We are a small museum with a 59 year history.  It has only been in the past two years that we began a regular program of temporary exhibits.  They have been a huge success, especially with our local community that had little reason to frequent the museum otherwise.  We changed the exhibit three times per year.  With a staff of 2.5 employees, that schedule did become overwhelming.  We are in the process of building a new museum right now, and are including a temporary gallery.  However, we are working with our designer to construct a space with semi-flexible exhibit infrastructure in place.  This way, when rotating exhibits, we can switch out content without having to re-imagine and reconstruct the entire space each time.  The new approach should decrease the impact of producing temporary exhibits on staff while also decreasing the amount of time that we have to close the temporary gallery for the change to occur.  We are opening the new museum with a two temporary exhibits per year schedule.   

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Kristy Griffin
Curator of Collections & Exhibits
Sitka Historical Society
Sitka AK

Hi Joe,

Most of our clients change their exhibit space about every ten years. For instance we helped on Geoffrey's project in ND. It was a big undertaking. Changing permanent exhibits varies client by client and is usually fundraising or capital dependent. However, many clients ask for the ability to change content on that permanent exhibit. This can be done by adding exhibits that allow the staff to add content, digital media or the changing exhibit gallery.

We have mostly done work for museums, nature centers or universities. Yet, we have had a few clients that tell their corporate history. We would love to help more companies tell their stories. Could you share how you went about looking for an exhibit design or fabrication partner? What were you looking for? Where did you look?

Thanks,

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Betty Brennan
President
Taylor Studios, Inc.
Rantoul IL

Betty,

Thank you for your response. As I had predicted, there is no standard practice when it comes to how long an exhibit stays on display.

You asked about how we chose our exhibit designer. I was brought into this company 4 years ago to help design and build the Heritage Center. I come from a background of being the Master Framer/Preparator at the Erie Art Museum (a medium sized museum) for 22 years. That's why this company hired me. We enlisted the services of Hadley Exhibit Design, out of Buffalo. Not 2 hours away, they were convenient, and have a GREAT track record. It was an easy choice. They did a stellar job in helping us to design and then fabricate our frames, display cases and graphics rails. We have ushered 2700+ employees through here, and our only complaint was that they didn't have enough time to spend looking at the exhibits. :) best complaint you could hope for.

Thanks again for your input.

Joe

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Joseph Popp
Exhibits & Archives Specialist
Erie Insurance Museum
Erie PA

Original Message:
Sent: 02-01-2016 06:08 PM
From: Betty Brennan
Subject: How often do you change your historic museum exhibits?

Hi Joe,

Most of our clients change their exhibit space about every ten years. For instance we helped on Geoffrey's project in ND. It was a big undertaking. Changing permanent exhibits varies client by client and is usually fundraising or capital dependent. However, many clients ask for the ability to change content on that permanent exhibit. This can be done by adding exhibits that allow the staff to add content, digital media or the changing exhibit gallery.

We have mostly done work for museums, nature centers or universities. Yet, we have had a few clients that tell their corporate history. We would love to help more companies tell their stories. Could you share how you went about looking for an exhibit design or fabrication partner? What were you looking for? Where did you look?

Thanks,

------------------------------
Betty Brennan
President
Taylor Studios, Inc.
Rantoul IL

A little late to this thread, but like others said for permanent exhibits about 10 years between overhauls is about normal, with periodic updates as new information or artifacts come in.  While at the BHA, we changed out exhibits about every month to every month and a half.  Larger exhibits that cost us any significant cost would be up around 2 months or so to justify the cost.  There have been exceptions to the rule (such as a temp exhibit that was up for like two weeks for a fundraiser), but that was our schedule  We had 3.5 locations (two traditional museum exhibit spaces, one large open space, and a house museum, hence the half) where we could host in-house and traveling exhibits, so in the four years I was there we did some 50 exhibits between those locations.

Staff wise during that time, we had at our height 3 - 4 people installing exhibits across all locations, at its worst, I was the the one installing exhibits as needed.  But generally there was about 2 people doing exhibit curation during the year.

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Rhiannon Cizon
Graduate Student
MALS - Heritage Management
Valparaiso University