Great guideline from the Association of Children’s Museums 2010 Interactivity panel “The Changing Face of Technology in Children’s Museums”.

The 3/6/9/12 rule:

No computer screens before age 3, no internet before age 6, no electronic gaming until age 9 and no unsupervised internet before age 12.

I am currently in Saigon, Vietnam, and visited the War Remnants Museum, a very powerful experience! As I am walking through the Museum I keep noticing small issues that are easily changed, but have a large impact on the visitor experience such as lighting, wayfinding and heights of graphic panels. Recently I have completed an exhibition audit for the Mobius Science Center preview facility.  The  Review included:

• Interviews with visitors
• Mapping of the visitor experience
• Review of exhibition lighting
• Suggestions for changes to visitor flow
• Review of graphics
• Review of wayfinding
• Review of audio visual systems
• Review of exhibition media
• Review of exhibit maintenance and repair program
• A review of the mix of types of exhibit, static, highly interactive, simple manipulatives
• A written report containing, recommendations for changes

If you are interested in a $1000 objective exhibition audit send me an email;

Mark’s Email

for a copy of a sample exhibition audit.

In 2006, a set of plastinated bodies, designed by plastination inventor Gunther von Hagens, was featured in the James Bond film “Casino Royale”  The plasticized remains of three human beings were posed playing poker, all at the request of the film’s producers. (ABC News)

Island State Becomes First in the Union to Ban Controversial Exhibitions of Real Human Bodies from China

By ANNA SCHECTER, ABC News

July 13, 2009—

Link to story

Hawaii has become the first state to officially ban exhibitions of human bodies for profit, shutting down the popular “BODIES…the Exhibition” show that displays “unclaimed” bodies from China.

Lawmakers in the island state said the possibility of profiting off executed prisoners from China would not be tolerated in a state where many residents come from Asian backgrounds.

Premier Exhibitions, the publicly traded Atlanta-based company that puts on the show, has made millions of dollars from “BODIES” exhibits across the country, in Europe and in Asia.

State Rep. Marcus Oshiro, Chair of the House Committee on Finance, said he introduced his state’s legislation after watching the ABC News 20/20 probe into the origins of the bodies.

The 2008 report uncovered a thriving black market in human bodies in China and a self-admitted dealer in the bodies black market who described “body runs” to a location where bodies, including those of executed prisoners, were sold for $200 to $300.

“I never thought the show would come to Hawaii and when it did I decided Hawaiians would not tolerate the exhibition of these bodies for commercial profit. These people could be executed prisoners,” Oshiro said.

“Hawaii has a large population of people with an Asian background so that hits very close to home,” he added.

The new law also increases the financial penalty for misuse of a dead human body from $1,000 to $5,000.

Oshiro said that Hawaii’s main historical museum does exhibit the sacred bones of native Hawaiians, and there are provisions in the state bill that allow for that exhibition to continue.

Some critics of the bill say that there is no difference between the display of those ancient remains and the plastinated Chinese bodies.

“I visited the exhibit. I learned something,” wrote one blogger under the name “Publius808″ in support of the exhibition in Hawaii. “If the allegations are true that these bodies were used without permission, then that’s terrible. But this law is banal and sophomoric putting personal bias over science and art.”

Where Do the Human Bodies Come From?

Premier denies that any of the bodies on display are from executed prisoners, saying that all of the bodies came from a medical school in Dalian, China, and that their suppliers assured them that no evidence of trauma has been found of any of the bodies put on display.

But school officials told 20/20 it was “not true” that the school provides bodies for display in the U.S. Instead, the report found the bodies were provided by a private company run by a professor from the medical university which initially supplied the bodies but had pulled out because of bad publicity.

In the wake of the 20/20 report, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo launched a probe into the company’s practices. Premier settled with Cuomo’s office in May 2008, and the terms of the settlement required the company to prove that any new bodies on display were from consenting individuals.

Premier was forced to post a sign at its New York exhibit and state clearly on its website that it cannot disprove the allegations that bodies on display come from executed prisoners. The company is also required to refund tickets of customers who would not have seen the show if they had known what was going on behind the scenes. Cuomo also requires that the company be monitored by an independent entity for two years to ensure that the new business practices are enacted.

The company said it “must rely on the affirmations of its Chinese supplier” that the specimens do not come from the remains of executed prisoners.

The company’s CEO Arnie Geller told ABC News 20/20 in February 2008 that he was “appalled” at the allegations that some of the bodies from his Chinese suppliers might be those of executed prisoners. He said his own medical staff had seen no such evidence and that his suppliers have assured him that “these are all legitimate, unclaimed bodies that have gone through Dalian Medical University.”

“If these can actually be attributed to even the people that we’re doing business with, we would have to do something about that immediately,” Geller said.

Lawmakers in Some States Want Answers

Lawmakers in California and Pennsylvania last year introduced bills to require proof that the individuals on display had given their consent, but the governors in those states did not sign them into law. Florida has introduced a bill this year.

Even Congress introduced a bill that could have shut down the show following the 20/20 report. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri) introduced the bill along with 21 co-sponsors to ban Chinese bodies from coming into the U.S., but it was never signed into law.

Brian Wainger, general counsel for Premier, declined to comment on this story.

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

New Home For Chinese Experience In America

New York Times, July 8, 2009

By Larry Rohter

“The newly expanded, newly relocated Museum of Chinese in America has chosen to open the doors of its new home on the edge of Chinatown quietly and gradually as it settles in over the summer. But it aims to make a big statement once it’s fully moved in about the role that Chinese immigrants and their descendants have played in constructing American society.

“The long-term goal is to create a national museum that will also be a cultural anchor” for Chinatown, said S. Alice Mong, the museum’s just-hired director. “There is a lot to do, we have many stories to tell, but we begin with this new building, which will allow us to have the programs to go along with what we envision.”

That building, a converted industrial machine repair shop at 211-215 Centre Street, was designed by Maya Lin, who also designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington and is a member of the museum’s board. With about 12,000 square feet spread over two floors, the Centre Street building is nearly six times larger than the museum’s current home, and cost $8.1 million to revamp. In the lobby Ms. Lin has created an art installation called “The Journey Wall,” which consists of bronze tiles that link Chinese-American families’ names and places of origin in China with the towns or cities where they settled in America.

She has created two entrances for the building, which are meant to symbolize the museum’s twin missions: helping Americans to understand the Chinese world better, and vice versa.

“Sometimes Chinese history is seen as unchanging, and put into a lacquered box,” said Cynthia Lee, the museum’s chief curator. “There is also a notion that Chinese isolate themselves into that box and don’t want to interact with the rest of society. We want to get away from that and show our history as a living, dynamic thing.”

The Museum of Chinese in America began nearly 30 years ago as the Chinatown History Project, and has amassed a large collection of documents and objects that register the history and culture of Chinese immigrants in America. But before the move to the new site the museum was confined to 2,000 square feet on the second floor of a building at 70 Mulberry Street, in the heart of Chinatown, that it shared with numerous other community groups.

The Centre Street location opened without fanfare late last month, and many of the artifacts collected over the years are still in transit from one building to the other. On Sept. 22 the museum is scheduled to hold a grand opening ceremony at the new building, when its permanent “core collection” will be unveiled, along with an exhibition of art combining the work of Chinese-American artists and Chinese artists living in the United States.

Ms. Mong, who formally assumes her new duties next week, comes to the museum from the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American leadership group whose founders include I. M. Pei and Yo-Yo Ma. Born in Taiwan and raised in Virginia and Ohio, she said she envisioned the expanded version of the museum as a place that would attract not just Chinatown residents and non-Chinese New Yorkers but also “tourists from Tennessee and Qingdao.”

Sam Quan Krueger, the museum’s chief operating officer, said: “The Committee of 100 is known as a network of prominent Chinese-Americans, the movers and shakers. So Alice’s coming here is a boon to our ability to raise individual capital while tapping into the vibrancy of the Chinese-American community.”

In this initial phase, with most exhibits still being installed, the museum is open only on Thursdays, with no admission charged. After the formal inauguration ceremonies it will be open Thursday through Monday, with an admission charge of $7 for adults and $4 for students and those 65 and over.

The new museum’s first public offering is the Chinatown Film Project, which began last week and will continue on Thursdays throughout the summer. Ten directors based in New York City, some of them of Chinese descent but most not, were commissioned to make short films, less than 10 minutes long, focusing on some aspect of daily life in Chinatown.

The results include impressionistic, plotless efforts like Wayne Wang and Richard Wong’s “Tuesday” and Jem Cohen’s “New York Night Scene” as well as story-driven shorts like Rose Troche’s “Sunday at 6” and Cary Fukunaga’s “Kiwi Lotion.” Once the museum has opened fully, the films will be shown in rotation throughout the day until year’s end.

Karin Chien, the film project’s producer and curator, said she hoped the new, larger museum and the chance it offers to showcase Chinese-American or Asian-American films and performers, from spoken word artists to musicians, would “facilitate a huge renaissance for Chinatown.”

“In the same way that the museum is expanding physically,” she added, “it wants to expand the scope of the media and artists it works with and the audience it attracts, and this seemed a good way to start.”

Two other events scheduled for this month also exemplify that approach. On Saturday the museum will be the host of Asian-American ComiCon, an event devoted to the role of Asians and Asian-Americans in comics and graphic fiction, and on July 24 through July 26, part of the 32nd annual Asian American International Film Festival, for years a staple event at the Asia Society, will be held there.

One section of the museum’s permanent exhibition that is already up and running, a multi-media presentation called “core portraits,” focuses on Chinese-Americans who in one way or another “exemplify a particular historical period.” The 10 subjects include a celebrity, the silent film era actress Anna May Wong, but the display also incorporates a restaurateur, a laundryman and the first Chinese graduate of an American university, Yung Wing, who studied at Yale in the mid-19th century.

Each of the video portraits runs three to five minutes and is accompanied by a scripted first-person monologue, delivered in English, that is based on statements made by the subject. Those texts have been written by some of the country’s most prominent Chinese-American literary figures, including David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen and Ha Jin.

“I think this museum can be a way for us to celebrate and investigate the role that Chinese people have played in building this country,” said Mr. Hwang, a playwright whose work includes “M. Butterfly” and “FOB.” “It is important to have an institution that can make the statement that we have always been a critical part of American history and at the same time ask what it really means to be a Chinese-American.”

Until Sept. 22 the Museum of Chinese in America is open on Thursdays, at 211-215 Centre Street, between Howard and Grand Streets, Lower Manhattan, (212) 619-4785, mocanyc.org”

Tutankhamun shabti, © SANDRO VANNINI

From: Nuvo,  “Indy’s Alternative Newspaper”

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Julianna Thibodeaux

Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs, one of the most high-profile blockbusters the city has seen recently, has just opened in unlikely quarters: the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. This local institution, touted as the world’s largest children’s museum, is actually not such a leap: the behemoth building with its newly expanded Welcome Center — two additional dinosaur replicas penetrating the new stories-high wall of windows in a perpetual state of party crashing — has certainly expanded to fill its increasingly large paw prints … but in a measured and strategic way. It is in this sense that Tut is a surprise.

President and CEO Jeffrey Patchen, speaking to me in a telephone interview after I’d toured the exhibition with my three children — ages 14, 4 and 2 — admitted that, while such an awe-inspiring exhibition does fit in with the museum’s mission — “to create extraordinary learning experiences that have the power to transform the lives of children and families” — it is also a departure: At a member rate of $15 for adults and $8 for children (non-members pay $25 and $15, with some discounts available), with prices determined by exhibition organizers, the mere fact of a ticket price separate from regular museum admission is something the museum largely did away with years ago. But as Patchen pointed out, the museum would not have been able to pay the rental fee for such a blockbuster. And this one practically fell in its lap, like a dust shower inside an Egyptian tomb.

The story begins four years ago, when the museum, through the development of another exhibit, first allied itself with Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt — referred to by Patchen as the real Indiana Jones — who invited museum staff to consult with first lady Suzanne Mubarak on the development of a children’s museum in Cairo. Hawass told Patchen, “We’ll work out some sort of thank you that’s appropriate.” And so it was announced, roughly two years later, that this latest Tutankhamun blockbuster would make its second stop (after Atlanta) in Indianapolis.

In order to make the exhibition more accessible, a $2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment was secured to underwrite the cost of free admission for 98,000 Indiana school students. Patchen told me more than 60,000 of these have already been claimed — so teachers reading this should act quickly to reserve their tickets.

While Tut is wonderful for the 8-and-up set (and museum literature promotes it as such), it is best not wasted on the younger ones. Taking my kids through Tut was more of a treat for me (and my 14-year-old) than it was for my younger kids; the beautiful artifacts displayed in moodily-lit galleries, some of which are organized according to what was found in the rooms of Tutankhamun’s tomb, while stunning, were so much statuary to my youngest, who kept trying to clear the security ropes to scale the pharaohs and funerary urns.

Save their ticket prices for the gift shop. But first hurry them over to Take Me There: Egypt, which reaffirms the museum’s excellence in installation development: Children (and their parents) can enlighten themselves about language and communication, urban and rural living spaces, the marketplace, care of the environment, and visual and performing arts in the country of Egypt, which many will learn for the first time is in Africa. Such a cultural immersion should do much to alleviate prejudice against the predominantly Muslim country, which too many Americans associate with terrorism and the events of Sept. 11.

While Tut is organized by National Geographic, Arts and Exhibitions International and AEG Exhibitions, the museum developed this new permanent but thematically-revolving installation Take Me There (replacing Passport to the World) to coincide with Tut. Take Me There: Egypt, open for the next two years, is free with regular museum admission; and as a companion to Tut, it does for children what Tut cannot: provide the kind of hands-on, interactive experience for which the museum is known.

Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs runs through October 2009. The museum is located at 3000 N. Meridian St. For tickets, visit www.childrensmuseum.org or www.kingtut.org.

First in a series on interactivity in Museums and Science Centers

There are several conferences where emerging technologies for museums is exhibited:
Association of Science and Technologies
Siggraph
InfoComm
Maker Faire

By Ed Wyatt
Published April 29, 2009
New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The value of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s endowment has fallen so sharply and quickly — and its recovery is so uncertain — that the Getty has taken the unusual step of abandoning its traditional budgeting formula, adding to its layoffs and cutting back plans for museum programs and acquisIn a summary of the budget cuts that will affect all four of the Getty Trust’s divisions, most severely the J. Paul Getty Museum, trust officials said on Wednesday that the institution had suspended its usual practice of basing its annual budget on an average of the endowment’s value over the last 36 months. Instead, it will use the $4.2 billion current value of the endowment, which has declined by 27 percent since the end of the last fiscal yeaAs a result, the trust’s overall budget will decline by 24 percent, to $220 million, with 97 employees being laid off and another 108 budgeted positions eliminated. The cuts will fall most harshly on the Getty Museum, the largest component of the trust, which will lose 62 positions and 25 percent of its James N. Wood, the president and chief executive of the Getty Trust, said that while limiting layoffs was a priority, “we also felt strongly that it was essential to preserve free entrance and existing public hours for our visitors.”

Museum visitors are not going to be fully spared the pain of the Getty’s budget squeeze, however. Fees for parking at the Getty Museum and the Getty Villa will increase on July 1 to $15 from $10. For a hilltop museum with no public parking nearby and in a city with limited public transportation, the parking increase is practically the same as an admission fee.

To some degree the cuts can also be traced to the trust’s longstanding policy of relying on earnings from its endowment, rather than fund-raising, to pay for operations. In recent years the trust adopted an investment policy that like that of many foundations, emphasized investments in illiquid assets like real estate, private equity and hedge funds.

Last June 30, “alternative investments,” which also include things like venture capital and distressed debt, made up 62 percent of the Getty’s holdings, with stocks at 24 percent. A recent prospectus for a Getty bond offering noted that the trust’s investment policy called for about 48 percent of its portfolio to be allocated to alternative investments, raising the question of whether the trust had been pushing the boundaries of its rules.

In June 2007 the trust’s endowment totaled more than $6 billion.

James Williams, the chief investment officer at the Getty Trust, said in an interview that the recent declines in the endowment’s value were “basically in line with the performance of other endowments” at universities and other nonprofit institutions and that asset allocations were “within the approved range” of the trust’s investment policy. He declined to comment on the specific current allocations.

“We have more than ample liquidity,” Mr. Williams said. “I would strongly disagree with any suggestion that this is a riskier portfolio. It is consistent with the best institutional funds out there.”

Mr. Wood, the chief executive, said that the trust’s board had decided to abandon the three-year-average formula to set its budget because, while it would ease the pain of budget cuts this year, “it would be setting ourselves up for a very big drop down the road.”

When he was appointed the Getty’s chief executive in December 2006, the institution was embroiled in a different type of crisis. The previous president, Barry Munitz, was forced out amid criticism of his leadership and questions about his use of the trust’s money.

The California attorney general appointed an independent monitor to oversee reforms at the institution, which in addition to the museum includes a conservation institute, a grant-giving foundation and a research arm. The Getty Museum was also the subject of inquiries into whether it had purchased stolen antiquities; the museum has in recent years been making agreements to return some works to their native countries.

“The immediate issues that we addressed were governance issues,” Mr. Wood said on Wednesday, but shortly after he turned to a strategic study that led to some minor administrative restructurings last year.

The new budget cuts mean that the Getty Conservation Institute will close 16 current projects and eliminate public programming. The Getty Foundation will slow its grant making, cut internships and reduce its gift-matching program, and the Getty Research Institute will cut library hours and acquisitions and transfer some databases to other institutions.

The Getty Museum will also reduce the number and scope of its temporary exhibitions and collection rotations, although no major exhibitions that have already been publicized have been canceled.

Michael Brand, the museum director, said the museum would withdraw from some larger exhibitions that had not yet been publicized, but he declined to specify which shows.

Mr. Brand said the museum had also considered instituting an admission fee but had decided against it. “In an environment like this, one is obliged to look at all ideas. But we concluded that maintaining our free-admission policy is absolutely what we should be doing.”

And while the trust’s board raised the parking fee, Mr. Wood said, the museum hoped that the move would not discourage visitors. “We desperately need the income, but we had to look at what would help us the most without making ourselves uncompetitive with other entertainment and high-art venues.”

For $15, he noted, “you can put as many people in the car as you want.” In other words, unlike the drive-ins of another era, the Getty will not be checking the trunk for stowaways.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 5, 2009
An article on Thursday about budget cuts at the J. Paul Getty Trust misidentified the objects that the Getty Research Institute, one of the trust’s divisions, will be transferring to other institutions, in addition to cutting library hours and acquisitions. They are databases, not collections.

A friend recommended that I visit the Hong Kong Science Center. Went on a Wednesday night, Wednesday is the free night at the Museum. Lots of families and young couples on dates. I started at the top floor and worked my way from the third floor to the basement. The Museum has lots Exploratorium Cookbook exhibits. As I was leaving the basement I noticed “The Deep” exhibition. I walked in and at first I thought it was an exhibition about movie props. Doubled back and read the intro panel and watched the intro video and then started going through the exhibition. The exhibition is divided into sections, by ocean depth, with a video at the end showing the species in their habitats. It was fascinating viewing the species and learning about the ways they adapted to their environments. After I went through once, I doubled back and went through a second and third time and noticed many visitors doing the same. I loved the exhibition, it felt like I had visited “another planet”, it was hard to believe these creatures live on our planet. I appreciated the tone of the exhibition it was not sensational, just factual, which made it that much more interesting. The exhibition is approximately 30’ by 70’ or 2100 square feet, I spent 40 minutes in the gallery and many visitors were spending longer.

Hong Science Center, The Deep Website