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Hi Sean and Dan

Dear Sean

The Hong Kong Science Museum provides the number of interactive exhibit 
available to visitor instead of percentage.  At most time, we have 550 to 600 
exhibits with around 380 - 420 are interactive.  We define any exhibits to be 
interactive in case it has interaction with visitor.  From the beginning of our 
operation back to 1991, we log down the information of maintenance work 
done into a database, including down/recover date, fault found, work done, 
time-taken, material used and working personnel.  Every month, we print out a 
statistic report with percentage to show things like longest maintenance time-
taken, the most frequent breakdown and etc.  This is helped to find out which 
exhibit is a repeated problem maker.  Throughout the years of operation, our 
breakdown rate drops from 7% to now, at a average range, from 1.5 to 3.5% 
of which we feel it is the best we can do.

Owing to shortage of manpower, we outsource quite large amount of 
maintenance work to outside specialists.  We have only 6 in-house staff that 
look after around 30% of maintenance work, paritcular those computer and AV 
stuff.  And we have two specialized contractors to look after the remaining 
70%.  One of my staff will be assigned as duty officer during our opening hours 
to oversee and monitor the maintenance work.  Most of the exhibit breakdown 
will be reported by the floor assistants and the duty officer will assign it to 
different parties.

Besides exhibit repair, we found regular maintenance and walk thourgh 
inspection also a good way to idenify fault or defect missed.

Dan, I am very interest in your study on visitor perception of broken exhibit.  
May I have a copy?  By the way, there was a subject titled "Broken exhibit - 
visitor perception" in February 2007 at this forum.  The discussions were 
inspiring.

Cheers

CK WONG
Senior Technical Officer (Operation and Maintenance)
Hong Kong Science Museum

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