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Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
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What a great notion! Years ago, and still operational today, we created a computer based exhibit that simply tracked use, that is it counted complete data entries by visitors––not partial ones.  Surprisingly, the on going data collection can be correlated with overall attendance, and the exhibit can be moved around the museum floor to measure use in different locations, which turned out to be surprising independent of location.  The exhibit itself actually recorded personal visitor physical characteristics which out collecting an personal identity data, and things like gender appeared to correlate with attendance reports and floor surveys.

It seems like it would be relatively easy and useful to create a universally applicable use counter that might record and remotely report on usage status.  Because of variability in the exhibit visitor interface, each exhibit would need to calibrated, so that its use characteristics might be correlated with its data recording characteristics, but once done there would be an on-going treasure trove of use and operations data that would in turn reflect exhibit visitor interactions.  Metrics for individual exhibits, use profiles, and building visitor flow patterns might emerge.

If language preferences were correlated with something like choice of language graphics were recorded it might be yet another way to record the population variations as a function of language preferences over time.

Such data bases might be further correlated across multiple institutions and human demographic populations.
C
On Mar 4, 2011, at 5:24 AM, Eric Siegel wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> You know what would be a real service to the field?  A web-based database program that would allow the end user to upload a generic file of their exhibits and create a database that would then be used with a handheld to track the daily functioning of each exhibit component.  I tried to spec this out several years ago, but the handheld technology wasn't developed enough yet.  There's (should be) an app for that!
> 
> Eric
> 
> On Mar 4, 2011, at 8:14 AM, Doug Johnson wrote:
> 
>> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
>> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
>> *****************************************************************************
>> 
>> Hello all, 
>> I was wondering if anyone in the community has any suggestions for a method of internal exhibit evaluation that is used for the exhibit department to track the daily status of exhibits. Specifically this would be used for an opening exhibit tech to rate exhibits for functionality and adherence to the exhibit label. Ideally the method would need to be non subjective.
>> 
>> Cheers!
>> Doug
>> 
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> ***********************************************************************
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Charles Carlson
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For information about the Association of Science-Technology Centers and the Informal Science Education Network please visit www.astc.org.

Check out the latest case studies and reviews on ExhibitFiles at www.exhibitfiles.org.

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