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Only you will know how many visitor you have and how careful or prone to
vandalism ( or spilling coffee) they might be.

It would also depend on how much of an inconvenience to your visitors
finding the keyboard not working is, and how active your maintenance
program is to find a dead keyboard quickly.


There are stainless steel vandal resistant keyboards available from many
kiosk manufactures, and some of these are designed to drop easily into
simple cabinetry. they do cost a few hundred dollars.

two other options

cheaper water proof keyboards ( often ALL SILICON, and able to be bonded
to a table), these have one membrane across the entire keyboard, so
don't suffer from coffee, or keys being lifted, are about $20 to $50...
and are not great for touch typing BUT for entering a name or email
address or similar would be fine.

alternatively depending on the software and platform you can get/buy
software based keyboards that can pop up on the screen - but how useful
or annoying these are would depend on your software that you are
running.


hope that is of some help.

Dr Stuart Kohlhagen
Manager Research and Development
Questacon
The National Science and Technology Centre Canberra





 

-----Original Message-----
From: Informal Science Education Network
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Shugart, Erika
Sent: Friday, 18 November 2011 6:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Keyboards - a quick technical question

ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology
Centers Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
institutions.
************************************************************************
*****

A quick technical question.  We are installing a kiosk that will allow
for text input from visitors. For those of you who have done something
similar do you have recommendations of keyboards that you have used?  We
are debating between very fancy (and expensive) mounted ones and very
cheap off the shelf ones that would sit on a table and would be replaced
when needed.
Thanks!
Erika

Erika C. Shugart, Ph.D.
Deputy Director
Koshland Science Museum: Interact with the Issues National Academy of
Sciences
525 E Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
Tel.: 202-334-1201 l [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> l
www.koshland-dc.org<http://www.koshland-dc.org/>



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