Recognition

“Visitors enter on the fourth floor and wind down through three levels of exhibits. The highlights: The entrance is an audiovisual tunnel pulsating with overlapping segments of Grammy performances. Large touch-technology tables allow exploration of 160 subgenres, from modal jazz, emo and zydeco to Celtic, Norteño and two-tone.”

“Guests are welcomed by wall-sized video screens and the ‘Crossroads Table,’ a touch-sensitive digital display that shows how different music genres interrelate. Interactive maps highlight the musical legacies of various American cities, and short video series delve into emerging music styles from the past five decades and how they correspond with pop culture.”

“Guests are immediately whisked to the fourth floor, where they’re greeted with an 18-foot touch-screen table that looks and feels like something out of a James Bond movie. There, they can put on headphones and scroll through genres—tap ‘outlaw country,’ for instance, and a Waylon Jennings song plays.”

“The museum floor dedicated to the recording process holds eight listening stations featuring lessons from producers, engineers and artists. But in Dupri’s ‘studio,’ where he talks to visitors via a flat-screen television, the lesson goes beyond how-to. If you step into this sonic laboratory, you’re not walking out until you make some music.”

“Web 2.0 technology allows users to search the database both by keywords and tags. It enables visitors to customize their exhibit experience by collecting images and creating posters, movies, and games that can be shared by email.”

“This latest exhibit at the National Archives, part of what is called the National Archives Experience, was not contained within its stone walls but in the bits and bytes of cyberspace. Unlike a typical online exhibit, the new Digital Vaults is more than the digitization of a physical display, it is an entirely new environment that allows visitors to create their own collections, games, posters, movies, and more based on the primary sources we hold.”

“It combines interactive elements and thousands of primary sources from the holdings of the Archives, and invites visitors to explore not only well-known people and historic turning points but also little known players and events that provide surprising perspectives and insights.”

“The simulation and physical situation place the participants in close proximity with each other to contemplate and attempt to solve complex global challenges. This award-winning mixed-use table design by Second Story Interactive demonstrates the flexible educational potential of well-integrated technology.”

“At another display, a floor console offers a bird’s-eye view of the festival grounds with a continuously looping computer animation of the weather for the three-day festival, including the infamous rain storm that briefly halted performances.”

“A rear-projected animated map of the festival site allows six people at a time to call up a wealth of festival information.”

“But this is a 21st century museum dominated by sounds and moving images. It’s hard to find a spot where you can’t overhear a crowd chant or a guitar solo pumping from one exhibit or another. There are five interactive exhibits and 20 films playing here, from kiosk shorts to the 50-foot high, wraparound movie that provides a you-are-there version of the concert.”

“The last exhibit covers Woodstock’s legacy. Visitors can summon dozens of films with a touch, and at the end they can tell their own stories. Veterans can relate their own Woodstock experiences.”

“Much of the exhibition is interactive. Visitors can lose themselves in front of touch-screens that replay songs from the era. It is possible to hear music’s evolution year by year, from 1960 to 1968, with hits from folk and country, pop, rock and rhythm and blues. The pivotal year, 1969, is afforded its own musical encyclopedia so visitors can experience the palette from which Woodstock’s creators worked.”

“And the museum itself? It’s entertaining and briskly informative...if you visit the museum, which I recommend, here’s what I would do: play with the interactive screens, admire the replica hippie bus, watch the film clips of Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez and the Who.”

“Scout staffers fell in love with this site the instant we found it. We couldn’t help but spend valuable time shuffling records to see what we could find and then collect our favorites into our own profile. We created our own pathways and marveled at the digital access we were granted. The site is well developed and designed, easy to use, and provides a plethora of valuable memorabilia and historical documents that could easily be used in the classroom or to create a fun and interesting homework assignment. This site was a shoe-in as one of our favorites for the academic year.”

“Interactive touches—both high- and low-tech—are scattered throughout the museum...Visitors can touch a replica of slave shackles and find out for themselves how heavily a soldier’s backpack weighed him down. Using touch-screen computers, they can learn how to recognize bugle calls, decode signal corps flag messages, and locate battlefield monuments.”

“The building is an interactive center where touch screen computers can show visitors quilting timelines for more information about textiles and quilting. Visitors can also design their own quilts digitally or curate their own exhibitions. When visitors are done creating their masterpieces, their work will be left on the server indefinitely and accessible online at any time.”

“The historical galleries next to the theaters are very much in line with the contemporary trend toward media-dense exhibits, filled with shorter films in mini-theaters, all carefully structured to draw the viewer through ‘a narrative’ presentation of the war, its causes and its aftermath.”

“The visitor center has been designed to immerse visitors in the Gettysburg story by exposing them to the National Park Service’s extensive collection of war objects, artifacts and archival materials, as well as interactive exhibits and displays that will prepare them to tour the areas where the fighting took place.”

“In another area, visitors can tap computer stations to see whether their ancestors fought here and follow troop movements on a touch screen.”

“What the curators of the new ‘Creating the United States’ exhibit have done is put this fragile document on display in a low-lit glass case. Then next to it is an oversize touch screen where visitors can literally scroll a cursor down over it and see the kinds of cross outs and rewrites...You can look at it in Jefferson’s hand and also see a typed version of it superimposed on top of the document.”

“Now touch-screen kiosks with the power to magnify images of objects, translate text and point to other information sources are found throughout the library’s exhibition spaces. Two kiosks offer the chance to look more closely at the library’s Gutenberg Bible and examine selected pages; others explain the mythological and literary references in the ornaments of the Italian Renaissance-style Jefferson Building. The exhibition ‘Thomas Jefferson’s Library’ also uses such kiosks to help look inside a few 18th-century books. And yes, these kiosks are what allowed me to see the changes in the Declaration so clearly, even identifying the different handwriting on the document.”

“The precious books are displayed behind glass for their protection, but visitors can use touch-screen technology to move digitally from page to page.”

“Tomorrow, the Library of Congress kicks off a celebration to mark the launch of the ‘Library of Congress Experience,’ an interactive exhibit with an online component that lets Internet users interact with primary sources from American history. On interactive display via touchscreen kiosks are books from Thomas Jefferson’s library, which have been captured in high resolution and will be available for page-by-page browsing, annotated maps from the Age of Discovery, and objects from the Americas before Columbus.”

“After seeing the new exhibits and visitor ‘Experience,’ we are happy to say that the Library of Congress has made it fully into the 21st century...Just off of the Great Hall, you can use one of the interactive kiosks to page through the LoC’s collection of rare bibles, which includes far more than their most hyped 14th century bibles, the Gutenberg Bible and the Giant Bible of Mainz...[T]he new LoC is vastly improved and its changes should bring it on par with the Smithsonians and other D.C. must-see museums.”

“Visitors can scroll through the Gutenberg Bible and the Giant Bible of Mainz on touchscreens after looking at the actual bibles behind glass. And visitors can walk among Jefferson’s library collection and take a closer look at the books on the touchscreen monitors.”

“Beginning April 12, the library will be more user-friendly as interactive exhibits devoted to the Great Hall, the creation of the United States, and Jefferson’s library open to the public. Visitors, on foot and online, will be able to ‘flip’ the pages of documents too precious to be touched by hand—such as the Gutenberg Bible and a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence with Jefferson’s handwritten edits visible.”

“There are also touch screens with narrations and images, along with displays of exceptional documents, including the only known copy of a famous 1507 map: the first to show the New World’s continents and the first on which the name America appears.”