for king and country? first world war interactive at the jewish museum, london

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Letters and a diary from the First World War

Roz Currie & Peter Pavement

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Brief

• Tender was for a museum Interactive to accompany a First World War exhibition at the Jewish Museum

• Originally the brief was just to show the letters of Marcus Segal, a Jewish officer who served (and died) on the Western Front (1916 – 1917)

• Subsequently it was expanded to include the Diary of Florence Oppenheimer, a nurse who served in the Eastern Mediterranean

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Personas

• The brief outlined “user stories” to communicate modes of interaction

• “Alice” – museum visitor who doesn’t know what she’s interested in

• “Ben” needs to find a letter from last time he visited - to show his friend

• Museum visitor “Zebedee” needs to find out how many chickens Marcus received during his time in the trenches.

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Personas• Museum researcher “Morris” is researching the role of

rats in wars • Staff member “Colin” spots a typo in a transcript and

needs to edit a letter • Staff member “Rebecca” finds a new letter in a drawer

and needs to add it to the system • Staff member “Henry” finds 100 letters written by

another Jewish person serving in the Armed Forces and wants to add a new section

• Museum staff member “Freda” wants to change or add a theme around a Jewish festival

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Strategy

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Kiosk

• To save on a tight budget we experimented with using consumer PCs to run the kiosk

• We used a touch screen “All in One” plus an MDF cabinet (as part of the exhibition build)

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Challenges

• Hardly any time for content production and design – some rough edges went live

• Conceptualising the diary content

• Connectivity within the museum for a web hosted system

• Built in software on the kiosk threw up some nasties!

• Visitor confusion over headphones and audio

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Benefits

• Makes a huge amount of content really accessible

• The kiosk will become part of the Jewish Museum’s permanent galleries

• The interactive will be available online, reaching a wider audience for a longer period than the exhibition

• The content can be extended with new document collections if they become available

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Roz Curriewww.thejmm.org.uk@JewishMilitary

Peter Pavementwww.surfaceimpression.com@peterpavement@surfimpress