TIME TO GET CREATIVE

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Holywells Park

Holywells Park in Ipswich, Suffolk have just installed the Discover Bird board in their newly refurbished café. The Park has undergone a 3.5 million restoration as part of the Parks for People project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Big Lottery Fund, with additional financial support from Ipswich Borough Council and the Friends of Holywells Park. The board has been a great success with families learning about the 70 birds on the board. They love listening to the bird calls and song, and the quiz is a real hit, especially the question about Harry Potter's owl.

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Oxford University Botanic Gardens

In 2011, after seeing DiscoveryPEN at the Museums and Heritage Show, London, Alison Forster, Curator, ordered the DP System. They wanted to issue visitors with the PEN and a leaflet that mapped the trail in a creative and informal way. Designed for the general public, the leaflet contains interviews with Philip Pullman, who's visit to the gardens was the inspiration for the Dark Materials series of books. There are sound spots with story-telling, introductions to various members of staff, and of course explanations about various plants. The print is on Polypropylene A4 double-sided coloured sheets. The trail was created by independent interpreter, Eka Morgan. So far they have two talking publications - "Tales of Trees and other Plants" and "Discovery Trail - an audio trail told by Oxford Chemists".

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Culloden Battlefield Museum, Inverness

Most blind and partially-sighted people visiting a museum need help being taken around. The helper usually narrates or explains what information is being conveyed. This can become a rather tiring, sometimes inaccurate, often not very animated process. In order to avoid manual explanations, Culloden was looking for a simple-to-use, digitally-produced solution. Unlike Oxford (who have leaflets), the curator decided to apply sound-enabled leaflets and discs onto the glass cabinets. Thereby, simply touching an illustration of the rifle used provides a full explanation. In total, there are over 25,000 words used in the entire audio exhibit, positioned in less than 30 A4 sheets.

 

St Andrews Golf Museum

St Andrews have a lot of secondary and primary school visits. The curator wanted to have a simple device that could be used for project work, in which students could build their own trail of information learnt during their visit. Using the DiscoveryPEN and recordable stickers, students are able to build their own trail with their own voice recordings, recordings free from the web as well as illustrations of photographs of the mayor taken during the day.

 

Imperial War Museum, Duxford

Kay Cooper wanted to enhance the experience blind people had at their museum. She chose the DP System with its recordable stickers. Duxford made specially designed cases with recesses for the stickers to create a seamless display originally designed for blind visitors. As the project progressed however, the possibility of use by sighted people was taken into consideration as well.

 

Bristol M Shed Museum

The M Shed Museum is a state of the art museum that expresses and informs people of the role Bristol played in various vital industries for Britain. They originally used the PENfriend with plastic medallions, but are replacing these with the DiscoveryPEN with recordable badges. Paul Sullivan is a great believer in maximising the experience of blind people. When asked what motivated blind people to visit museums, he replied, "It's like this: suppose you were on holiday in Greece and you phone home. You would give a verbal description of the place, the sunsets, the cities, the beaches, etc., and the listener would build a picture of you in Greece. So the same thing happens with Museums." (PENfriend is designed for personal use by blind people; DiscoveryPEN is intended for institutions.)