Lessons from the Road – AASLH Presentation
This weekend, we had the privilege to present some of our exhibit design philosophy at the American Association for State and Local History conference in Oklahoma City. The session, titled “Lessons from the Road,” was a small panel discussion very skillfully facilitated by Leslie Przybylek of the Mid-America Arts Alliance / Exhibits USA. Clay Lewis, NEH on the Road Program Administrator, Chuck Regier, Curator of Exhibits at Kauffman Museum, and Anne Morand, (ex) Curator at the C.M. Russell Museum made up the rest of the panel.
It was fascinating to hear perspectives from all levels of the exhibit development process, highlighting challenges faced along the way and innovative solutions to those challenges. It was also great to talk with people from the institutions who host the exhibits, and to brainstorm with them about possibilities for supplemental programming and promotion.
Thanks to those who attended. And for those who missed it, give us a call–we’d be glad to fill you in!
Update:
A few days ago we received feedback from our AASLH presentation. Everyone who rated our presentation gave us an overall rating of 10/10, and one person even said it was the best session they attended while they were there. Once again, thank you to everyone who came and visited us at the AASLH conference!
Dropbox
For the past few weeks we’ve been using a folder sharing service called Dropbox. While there are many alternatives to using an online hosted service such as this one, Dropbox fit all of our requirements:
- Easy to use for computer experts and novices alike
- Cross-platform (Flint Hills Design is Mac based, most clients use PCs)
- Easy to backups
- Minimal resource requirements (individual computers and network)
- 24/7 access
Basically, we needed a reliable file sharing application that we could control as we see fit. Dropbox met all these requirements. Some other options didn’t:
- Web App
We thought about creating our own web app, but hundreds already exist and we didn’t have time. Plus, most of the existing apps such as Basecamp provided many more features than we really needed (simplicity is one of our most basic guiding principles). - MobileMe
We’ve found MobileMe to be flaky, especially for some of our PC using clients. We really needed this to be bulletproof. - File Sharing
The Apple based file sharing was a possibility, but if a computer is turned off you’re out of luck. And it didn’t seem right to be tying up others’ computers and their internet connections every time another user requests a file. - Dedicated Linux Server
Probably a good option, but we didn’t want to hassle with the configuration or security issues…
So in the end Dropbox won out. It’s easy to use and install on all operating systems. Because it looks and acts like a regular folder on our hard drive, everything is backed up automatically (and dropbox provides a time-machine style online backup as yet another measure of safety). It’s always on and doesn’t consume precious computing resources due to our files being hosted on Dropbox servers. And best of all it’s free for accounts under 2GB! From our experience so far we’d recommend it to anyone.
