I sent an email recently to the excellent Museums Computer Group email list asking about their experience using Raspberry Pis in a museum environment.
For those that don’t know, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer that retails for about £30. It runs a version of Linux, can be connected to the web and has enough power to do useful things. In the museums world, these might include connected digital signage that you can edit from your desktop, ultra-cheap touchscreen kiosks in your galleries or even monitoring conditions in display cases.
What I found fascinating about the responses, of which there were many, wasn’t that this is an interesting idea in a vaguely conceptual, academic kind of way. It was that there are lots of real-world examples of museums, large and small, local and national, that are using these amazing devices to do interesting things.
It’s exciting to see this sort of thing going on. Not just from a geeky point of view (although it ticks boxes for me), but also because it disrupts old and expensive business models and processes. Companies that, to date, have been the only place to go for bespoke kiosk or signage solutions, or environmental monitoring, are, or should be, thinking hard about what their offer is and how it matches up to a world in which open-source, solid, reliable hardware can be bought for £30.
It’s also great to see museums continuing to experiment and play – we all know the sector is great at this, but maybe sometimes we’re not terribly good at shouting about it.
Mike Ellis is a director of the digital consultancy Thirty8Digital
For those that don’t know, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer that retails for about £30. It runs a version of Linux, can be connected to the web and has enough power to do useful things. In the museums world, these might include connected digital signage that you can edit from your desktop, ultra-cheap touchscreen kiosks in your galleries or even monitoring conditions in display cases.
What I found fascinating about the responses, of which there were many, wasn’t that this is an interesting idea in a vaguely conceptual, academic kind of way. It was that there are lots of real-world examples of museums, large and small, local and national, that are using these amazing devices to do interesting things.
It’s exciting to see this sort of thing going on. Not just from a geeky point of view (although it ticks boxes for me), but also because it disrupts old and expensive business models and processes. Companies that, to date, have been the only place to go for bespoke kiosk or signage solutions, or environmental monitoring, are, or should be, thinking hard about what their offer is and how it matches up to a world in which open-source, solid, reliable hardware can be bought for £30.
It’s also great to see museums continuing to experiment and play – we all know the sector is great at this, but maybe sometimes we’re not terribly good at shouting about it.
Mike Ellis is a director of the digital consultancy Thirty8Digital
