Some more background on the interactives we've recently installed at the Great North Museum...

Medieval Case Study

This looks at how archaeologists can find out about how people used to live from the objects they left behind - and imagines what objects from today will survive for the next 1,000 years. Aimed at a younger audience, this interactive is bright and breezy - but crucially is gauged towards a fairly short visit time and gets lots of information across in a punchy and engaging style.

The Orientation Map

This is one of the 'big ticket' items in the museum; a pair of interactive map tables that allow users to explore Northumbria and its key sites of interest.

We've just installed 15 interactives and 10 AV presentations at the brand new Great North Museum in Newcastle. The museum launched on Saturday and - as a combination of four existing museums - is an incredible mix of Prehistory,  Roman Britain, Ancient Egypt, nature and the environment. We're proud to have our work in this fantastic museum.This project adds another string to the Cogapp Violin* as it is made up of many separate deliverables, as opposed to one deliverable with many parts (like MoMA.Guide,  ParaData and countless other goodies). Here's a quick look at some of the interactives; we'll look at the AV bits in another blog.

Diversity of Life

When visitors first enter the museum they are greeted by the massive Diversity of Life wall. Two stories high and running the entire length of the opening gallery, the wall is home to hundreds of animal specimens, grouped into Tropical, Temperate, Desert and Polar regions.It would be impossible to provide useful signage in this environment - and that's where digital comes in. We've built eight interactives which give users access to a digital recreation of the wall and lets them find out more about each animal. It's a simple idea but the beauty of it is in the execution; there is almost no interface and the interactive does only a few things - but very very well.

Sadly this post has nothing to do with Dennis Norden holding a clipboard and saying, 'if you're one of those people...'

No. This one is all about the organised (and not so organised) chaos that happens in the last few weeks before a museum opens its doors. We've been lucky enough to be involved in the new Great North Museum, which opened on Saturday - and even luckier to go behind the scenes in the last few weeks of installation.

(That's a dinosaur in the Great North Museum. Nothing to do with us, but great!)

There's a scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love when the theatre manager, beset by financial woes, unreliable writers and the Master of the Revels threatening to shut him down, simply shrugs his shoulders and says, 'It'll all work out alright in the end. I don't know how, but it always does.' Launching a new museum or gallery is very like getting ready to launch a stage show - everything seems crazy until the last moment, when it suddenly all falls into place.

Okay so this post doesn't sound as exciting as Codeos and round-ups of fun stuff but it's still worth a few moments of your time...

We're all very pleased to say that our latest Cogapp-developed museum website launched a couple of months ago, created for the National Portrait Gallery. In fact, our working relationship with the Gallery goes way back to 1990s (remember them?), when we were commissioned to build their 'original' site, the Portrait Explorer kiosks and an accompanying CD-ROM.

The existing site was very much of its time: based on databases and built with HyperCard, it consisted mostly of flat, static pages.  By 2008, when our work on the new site began, the needs of both staff and visitors had evolved and we clearly needed to take a completely fresh approach. Not least to the back-end processes through which Gallery staff update and add to the site.

At the heart of this new approach was our selection and use of a new content management system, or CMS. Just in case you don't know: a CMS is a tool that facilitates the creation, editing and control of web content, usable even by those who have no technical training. For a client like the National Portrait Gallery, this means that staff at the Gallery can easily and visibly update their own content while the site remains live. A CMS gives the user a lot of autonomy and flexibility because they're not tied to the developer to make small changes to layout and other minor revisions. Most of all, using a CMS is completely separate from the back-end processes, meaning that if anything goes wrong, it's most probably the developer's fault, which hopefully makes it easier to fix! And finally, a CMS ensures that content is separate from design. If changes to layout are made, it doesn't affect the valuable, often very substantial content.

We've recently been involved in in a proposal for a brand new museum, putting together ideas for a large number of different interactives which address a number of gallery needs and look at a wide range of content.

We always hit the same problem with these projects: that the ambition of the work far outstrips the available budgets. And one of the reasons for this is that we seem to re-invent the wheel for each new interactive.

I can't talk about the museum in question for obvious reasons, so let's invent one for a thought experiment.

Welcome once again to another spirited read-through of the screenplay that is the Cogapp internal blog. Let's kick off scene one with a mash-up.

These boots were made for walking
Spotted by Ian.

A fabulous Google Maps mash-up (what, another one?) which lets you plan and calculate a route on foot.

Yes, it's that time once again when we roll up our sleeves, plunge our hands expectantly into the digital tombola that is the Cogapp internal blog and pull out exciting prizes for all... Social networking for your Gran Spotted by Gavin This is from a research project created by Middlesex University.

This is the second part of an article looking at the authorial voice and what we can and can't do with it.

Okay, deep breath...

So you're a major cultural institution; you've got fantastic content and you're an authority on it (well, as much as you can be these days).

Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more... er... authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe... and you (the public) believe us.

I've just got back from the Future Trends: Innovative and Interactive Museums conference held by Heritage365 at the Wellcome Collection yesterday.