Lunch and Learn, May 13 2020

Overview

In order to inform the museum community about the CLIO toolkit and garner feedback on interest in and barriers to deploying technology like CLIO, two online informational and discussion sessions were held with 25 museum professionals attending each. These are the transcripts from the first webinar session held on May 13, 2020. Participant names have been anonymized.

Transcript

Speaker #1: I have one question about inputs.

Dillon Connelly: Oh yeah, go right ahead.

Speaker #1: We are a smaller museum. We don’t have a lot of, but we treasure our push buttons. Can this work with our push button systems?

Dillon Connelly: You can use any sort of trigger you want. We've designed these to be touch screen activities, but if somebody at your museum has some JavaScript knowledge and has something that they've written as a web app, you can integrate that into Clio as a new activity. So, if you did have a push button activity that worked with an Arduino or something like that. You could absolutely integrate that into Clio.

Dillon Connelly: I'm personally familiar with the term push button, I assume you mean a push button to activate some sort of playback.

Speaker #1: That's correct.

Joshua Frechette: Okay, so Raspberry Pi's have a GPO port, which is still fully accessible. If you do know someone who knows a little bit of Python coding, you can do all sorts of stuff through the interface. The interface is currently using PHP to run scripts to change brightness of the screen. You can trigger similar scripts for exhibit effects using a button on the interface. This could call a script on the Pi to do exhibitry lighting or sounds, maybe.

Dillon Connelly: So if there's a pre-existing script that runs a push button activity at your museum, that can be integrated into Clio. Any JavaScript, HTML, or PHP scripting option can be worked into Clio as a new activity. Even Python, if that's what you're using to do scripting for the exhibitry.

Speaker #1: Thank you.

Dillon Connelly: Anybody else have any questions? If not, we can move on to the discussion portion of our seminar today. There's three questions I want to throw out to y'all.

For because, I have to confess, I stalked many of you after I got your email addresses and y'all are doing some really, really impressive work out there.

The first question I want to open up to the floor is: could you see integrating technology like Clio in your practice - whether or not it's Clio itself, or some sort of open-source technology. Obviously, y’all have some sort of interest in that, because you're participating in this seminar. But, what are the ways you can anticipate or you would want to integrate some open-source technology into your museum practice?

Speaker #2: I see this, I think this would be really cool to kind of integrate onto an iPad or something and have docents be able to use it throughout a live walk around throughout the galleries. That's what I was envisioning our museum would use it for.

Joshua Frechette: So, if you already have an internal web server in your museum, this works exactly like a website so you can just host it internally and then just pull up on your iPad. The address of that website will load it full screen on the iPad in Safari.

The only thing that would maybe be a problem is it's all using it through JavaScript. So it kind of pulls things as it needs it. So, if you're a museum is going through a lot of web traffic because it's really busy, some of the activities might load a little slow because this is meant more to be a static kiosk, where the kiosk is hosting its own web server so it doesn't have to worry about the bandwidth of the rest of your museum.

It would work, though. The nice thing is that, even if it's not an iPad, you could use any kind of tablet, like a Windows tablet would work really, really well, where you could host everything on the Windows tablet. iPads are a little more difficult to create things that host a server, but any touchscreen tablet could run Clio really, really easily.

Dillon Connelly: What are some other ideas? What other ways can y'all see, or would like to see some tools like Clio integrated into museum practice?

Speaker #3: My name is [REMOVED] and I run a small geology museum in [REMOVED], and I'm actually working on an exhibit on subduction zones in Norway, and there's a lot of before and after with the rocks themselves. And so I'm really interested in that slide interactive and I am thinking about using it as a static kiosk that would be part of an interactive. What's great is that I have a budget of about $1,000 for this exhibit and the faculty member I'm working with is insisting on an interactive. So I've been trying to figure out and do that.

Dillon Connelly: For the concept mobile museum exhibit that we built, we actually got a microgrant from the University of Washington to build these. The entire budget for this whole project was 1700 dollars and we only spent about 1000 of that on the actual project itself.

The rest was just additional prototyping supplies for exploring some alternate deployments. So this is a really good thing for those micro budget kind of projects. That's really what we've designed the software for.

Speaker #3: Good. Yeah, it looks very slick.

Dillon Connelly: Thank you. So, following up on that, since we've discussed what ways you might be interested in integrating Clio, what kind of tools or resources would you find helpful in integrating technology like Clio at your museum?

Speaker #4: I personally really enjoy that you have a ready-to-burn image file to try something out like this. Spit it out, put it on a Raspberry Pi and try it that way. So, I always appreciate it when there's a zero effort thing to get it going.

Joshua Frechette: What we really wanted to try and focus on, is how Raspberry Pi's are exceptionally good at being cloned, as many as you need, as quickly as you need them. You can set up a printer to print a case and clone Raspberry Pi's as the cases finish printing.

So, we'll have a burnable SD card image that you can just plug and play into a Raspberry Pi as is. The only thing you'll need to change is the custom media files that you create for your interactive.

Speaker #4: Okay, and that's mostly done by the end user making these interactives. Basically they're editing a JSON file, and then your software translates that into the pretty format?

Dillon Connelly: Precisely.

Joshua Frechette: The entire point was to try and help museums re-use rich text and content that they've already created, so they don't have to go through recreating the wheel again.

Dillon Connelly: You just tell the CLIO interface, in the JSON file, here's what this image looks like, here's what you need to highlight, and you run with it.

Speaker #4: Does it do any image scaling or at all?

Dillon Connelly: As of right now, no. The only thing that CLIO has been fully programmed for was the Raspberry Pi touchscreen. I want to make it more resolution independent. Right now, it'll load on whatever screen size you have. Some activities, like the image comparison, don't scale up to the full screen yet.

Speaker #4: Okay. All right.

Dillon Connelly: What other kind of resources, which I'll find helpful in integrating this into your museum practice?

Speaker #5: I am interested in the 3D printed kiosk. And, is that a file that you give out for people with 3D printers, or how does that work?

Dillon Connelly: The 3D printable STL files are included in the zip package. The toolkit will also contain the SD card image.

Joshua Frechette: The package doesn’t contain the SD card image yet. I haven't gotten to that point. Right now, it has the files for the cases, so that you can print the case, and it also has the web application directory that you would copy over to a web server.

Dillon Connelly: That's coming this summer, the SD card flashable image will be available, which will include the Linux installation.

There’s also the separate kiosk files that you can either 3D print yourselves, or if you don't have access to a 3D printer at your institution, many universities have public maker spaces. Public libraries are also starting to create public maker spaces where you can 3D print for pennies a gram. The cost to print one of the kiosks is about 15 dollars. So really, really inexpensive.

Any other tools or resources that you guys would find helpful? We're going to try and include some video explainers, documentation, a wiki and a forum. If there's anything else that you would find useful to help you dive in, we would appreciate any feedback that you could give so we can make this as accessible as possible.

Speaker #6: I actually have a question about integrating video or anything like that. For example, have a very large collection of oral histories and anytime we put an oral history out there, we also want to use the transcript and caption it for people who wouldn't be able to listen to it directly. So I guess the first question is, is audio integrated into this system, and is there a way to do captioning?

Joshua Frechette: As of right now, yes, you can do audio. You can also pick whether or not you want to use the audio. So, if you give it a video file that has audio, you can choose to disable it. But right now, there's no means for subtitles, but definitely something that I would like to add, because that is also a very important accessibility feature.

Dillon Connelly: Yeah, right now, you would need to hard code those captions in there. Or another option is including transcripts for those oral histories on a separate website that people could pull up on their smartphones as an accompaniment. You could have a QR code to pull those up. But right now, any subtitles would need to be hard coded.

Alright, so the last question I wanted to throw out to y'all is if you were to try and explore integrating Clio at your institution, what kind of barriers, if any, could you foresee that would make it difficult for you to do so? Whether or not that's institutional inertia, or lack of knowledge. What is it that could foresee that could hopefully help alleviate through content on our website? What kind of barriers could you see towards an integrated Cleo at your museum practice?

Speaker #6: I think the biggest thing is I'm probably the most high tech person at our institution. And I'm very low tech. Any sort of technology, I think we're used to handing off what we want to do and having someone else do it because;

One, we don't have the time. But also, we feel often that it's just too much. There’s not enough knowledge, we have no IT staff. That sort of thing. I think that's the biggest barrier for us as a museum with a low technology knowledge base.

Dillon Connelly: So, as many plug and play options as possible for y'all would be helpful.

Speaker #6: Totally, yeah.

Dillon Connelly: Okay. Would explainers be helpful? Like really simple, step-by-step, here's how you do this? Here's how you install this. Here's literally, word by word, what you need to enter into this code to change these things. That'd be helpful?

Speaker #6: I think so. I think it depends, like maybe for me, less so for some of my co-workers, who I think would be really interested in this technology, and are looking at some of these things for some of their future exhibits, but kind of overwhelmed by technology at the same time.

Dillon Connelly: Understandable. That was one of the goals with this project, to try and lower the activation energy to using tools like this in museum practice. I think there's a lot of people who go, “Well, I'm not a coder, so I don't know anything about open source software because you need to be a coder to do that.”

I, myself, am not a coder and I've been exploring creating content using Clio, which was mostly designed by Josh. I kind of just threw around some ideas I had; is at all possible for you to do this with your technical wizardry? And he would do it. I've been able to understand that, and I'm very stupid.

One of the things that we're trying to do here is really say is: you don't have to be a coder, you don't have to. You just have to follow some instructions. If you can, if you can work Photoshop or if you did some light HTML on your MySpace page in 2007, you have the basic know-how to use this tool set.

Joshua Frechette: Going back to what I said before: this is based off of JSON. So, there's not really much you have to edit. You don't have to go in and edit source code. You don't have to change the website, or change the branding. You open basically what amounts to a text file and you can change the text, and the link to the picture. Then, when you refresh the page, it'll update that activity.

It's less having to know how to code a website, and edit the website, and design, and move around a website, than it is just changing some text in a file which I think was trying to aim towards making it less tech involved.

Dillon Connelly: Yes, exactly. Everything you need to do is change a file location and maybe some resolution sizes. And that's all you got to do after you've created the media you want to. Most museums are creating their own content for websites, or educational programming. Even for exhibits as a whole. Say you're a historical society, you probably have tons of content that's being digitized right now as a part of conservation efforts. Why not create a toolkit that allows people to easily have a kiosk with scrolling pictures from your archives of the last 70 years of a certain site?

Dillon Connelly: What other barriers could you see into integrating this into your practice?

Speaker #7: One of the biggest barriers that we have with any technology in our museum is upkeep and troubleshooting. I believe it was Speaker #6 earlier who said that she was the most tech savvy person at their institution. I sort of fall into that bucket, as well, to the point of troubleshooting VCRs. That is a barrier that is very real in our world.

What is the long term maintenance of these systems, or how frequently do they break, or bug, or do anything that will require me getting a call in a completely different building?

Dillon Connelly: Well, one of the nice things about open-source technology is: it's your code. Once you download it, there's not a check in online to make sure that you've still paid your subscription and you're not waiting on Windows to push out an update.

If you get this working for an offline kiosk, it'll run black-box style, which means just it starts up and shuts down the same way, over and over again. And as long as you've got the original files you used, if the SD card breaks, you can just flash an SD card with the exact same information and plug that right back in.

As one of our sustainability options, we want to make sure that we were using robust hardware. The Raspberry Pi foundation is really, really firmly established so their hardware is going to be around for the next 10 years. Linux is constantly community supported.

Once you've set it up, and programmed it, and have it how you want it because you don't need to have these kiosks online -- it's hosting an offline web server -- it'll run in perpetuity until you no longer need it.

Then, because all this stuff is low cost and modular, if something does break -- say the touchscreen cracks -- you can simply purchase a new touchscreen from the Raspberry Pi foundation, swap it out, and it works just fine.

Joshua Frechette: I just wanted to say that all of the parts are printed individually, so if one piece of the arm snaps, you just need to print that piece of the arm and replace that. You don't need to go through the whole process of printing the whole thing. For instance, this arm takes about half an hour to print, from start to finish.

You'd also asked about durability. One of the things that we tried to do for these kiosks to make them a little more durable is the actual screen protector around the screen is made out of a flexible filament so that, if you drop it, it acts a little more like a cushion.

Dillon Connelly: Yeah, and the design is a little thick. You can see in the 3D printable file there's a webbed fill in here that acts as a shock absorber. We've tested it, you can drop these from about five feet and this touchscreen survives.

But in terms of the software, too, if you set this up as a black box to run on its own, once you download it, you're not going to deal with any updates or anything if you're running it offline. It'll just keep running. It'll run that same version over and over again.

So you shouldn't run into a situation where there was a security update that messed this up. We wanted to create a technology package that if you download this in 2020 and you want to re-use that exact same kiosk file in 2023, you don't need to download new files. You can just dig up that old file, flash it to an SD card, and it works the same way in 2020 as it as it will in 2023.

Is there anything else, any other barriers or anything? Any other questions, y'all have in general? We've got about 10 minutes left and don't want to take up too much time. I know that you guys are taking the time out of your busy lunch to come and have lunch with us and talk about this stuff.

Alright, well, if no one has any more questions, I want to thank you. I want to thank you all for joining us today. It's been a pleasure to hear some of your feedback. It's exciting to know that people are interested in using this technology. If anything else occurs to you, we have our website up at Cliomuseums.org and our email is Clio@Cliomuseums.org

Feel free to download the software and play around with it. We're going to be updating it as we develop this over the next couple months and get an initial release out there. Please feel free to reach out with questions, suggestions, anything you want.

We'll leave the meeting open for until to one, but I will release y'all into the wild. Thank you so much for joining us.