Article

The British Museum exhibits its kiosks

An initiative to make the museum's collection more accessible is preparing to expand into the venerable facility's reading room. Museum officials are optimistic the new kiosks will enjoy similar success to deployments launched earlier this year.

September 2, 2002

LONDON -- The British Museum is home to an array of objects from across the historical spectrum, and receives more than 6 million visitors a year. But the sprawling central London museum is not the type that can be thoroughly visited in a day or two.

As a result, work began in 1997 on the COMPASS (Collections Multimedia Public Access System) project, to make the museum's collections available on interactive kiosks and the World Wide Web.

In September, 20 new kiosk terminals will be installed in the museum's venerable Reading Room, representing the project's latest phase.

The project aims to enhance the museum's ability to impart knowledge to a wide audience. That goal is pursued through improving the museum experience, expanding the museum's collection availability, and providing context for the objects by developing a richer understanding of the cultures from which they originate.

Something old, something modern

A unique challenge for COMPASS officials was how to incorporate kiosk technology into the museum's Reading Room. Built in the 1850s, the Reading Room is a striking circular, domed room with radial desks once used by such luminaries as Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, and Virginia Woolf.

The challenge was to preserve the room's environment while meeting the need for a high-tech 21st century information center.

The task of designing a suitable look and feel for the equipment was entrusted to Foster and Partners, an architectural firm whose past projects include the museum's Great Court redevelopment, Germany's Reichstag parliamentary building, and Hong Kong International Airport.

"Foster's took the view that it would be wrong to try to dress the new technology in faux Victorian style," said David Jillings, British Museum head of new media and COMPASS director. "Instead they chose a solution that looked modern while being in keeping with the room.

"The final terminal design evokes an open book on a book rest, the flat Dell touchscreen has the proportions of a book, and the theme is continued in the interface and styling of the content presentation," he added.

Getting organized

Data Vision Europe Ltd. supervised the hardware production. Making the kiosks user friendly and expandable was a key initiative of the project.

"Our role included the design of the mechanical, operational, and thermal properties of the kiosks," said Mike Kellond, Data Vision's project director. "The machines, designed to serve 3 million people per year, are fitted with audio headsets and amplification for public address."

Kellond said the kiosks include infrared ports, which can be used for PDA communication and smart card payments, which may allow users to eventually pay for information or purchase color prints of collection objects.

Software for the project was provided by NetShift Software Ltd., which is powering the machines using NetShift Version 5.5 and is offering ongoing support for the units.

"NetShift software as the chosen platform for the British Museum solution is a further example of the value of NetShift in the museum sector," said Nigel Seed, NetShift chairman and chief executive officer. Seed noted that NetShift software is being used for similar deployments at museums in Japan and Sweden.

To provide content for COMPASS, the museum gathered a team that accumulated data from a wide range of sources. The museum's existing collections management system was the primary source for indexing terms and details such as the dimensions of each object.

The system's text -- written for the use of academics and curators -- was not considered suitable for a public system. So the COMPASS team collected information from other available sources -- display texts, education packs, catalogs, and publications. But in the end, the majority of the content was written by the museum's curatorial staff, which followed guidelines to make sure the information would be easy to read, even for visitors who do not speak English as a first language.

The team also scanned images from the museum's existing stock of color transparencies, as well as commissioning new photography where necessary.

The system contains around 5,000 articles, 4,500 of which describe individual artifacts, while 500 offer background information on specific museum themes. Each object has links so users can browse between related objects and access information on the people and cultures that made or used them.

The Reading Room version of COMPASS goes beyond the Web version, offering higher quality images, animations, 3-D reconstructions, and gallery plans.

Happy returns

COMPASS is financed from a $10 million donation by philanthropists Walter Annenberg, the former United States ambassador to Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and his wife, Leonore. Part of the funds have been spent on refurbishment efforts in the Reading Room, while the majority has funded the development of the room's Annenberg Centre, which will host the COMPASS terminals. Museum officials did not disclose how much has been spent on kiosks.

The donation covered all aspects of the project, including staff costs, accommodation and management overheads, and the use of internal services such as photography.

"This makes the COMPASS project very much more than just a procurement exercise for a database and public access system," Jillings said, "and has served to highlight just how much of the total cost goes towards the preparation of the content material."

The museum launched Children's COMPASS this past February with sponsorship from the Ford Motor Trust. It incorporates a special children's search, activities and quizzes for classroom use, a notice board, and articles written specially for children ages 7 to 11. Alongside the terminals are quiz sheets for children and family groups. Children are encouraged to find objects on COMPASS and then look at them in the galleries in order to complete the quiz.

From a user standpoint, COMPASS has been a success thus far, according to Jillings.

"We logged around 800 hours of unsupervised public use on five workstations during April this year," he said. "We recorded some 2,250 user sessions. The average user session was 21 minutes. The average number of museum artifacts looked at in each session was 18. Over 24,000 searches of the database were made, and some 66,000 records were displayed on screen in total."

Although the scheme initially was not intended to generate a profit for the museum, it has produced some commercial benefits and added to the museum's assets. The COMPASS budget paid for a high-resolution scanner, which will produce images that can be licensed through commercial picture libraries.

"The commercial aspects are not yet exhausted and the museum is still looking actively at ways to exploit COMPASS," Jillings said, "focusing principally on the commercial re-use of content."

"The project is still ongoing and there will be more developments in hardware, software, and management," he added.