Web and digital

Simon Stephens on a multimedia guide that adds value to a very popular military museum

Traditional multimedia guides might not be cutting-edge technology any more, but they can still be extremely effective interpretation tools for museums.

This one, recently developed for London’s Household Cavalry Museum by Imagineear on its MPtouch device, is very straightforward and easy to use. It offers two tours – a highlights one lasting 20 minutes and longer one lasting an hour, although visitors can decide to skip some of the content.

The guide replicates the layout of the museum and is divided into the three main areas. It offers an introduction to each display area, followed by more detailed information, largely consisting of interviews with soldiers, for those who want to find out more.

The guide is offered free to visitors with their entry fee (£7 for adults, £5 for children) and is available in five languages with more to be added later, including Mandarin. The museum, which is in a great position in Whitehall, attracts lots of tourists and received 82,500 visitors last year.

I think the guide would benefit from more video and better quality photography, but overall it adds value to what is already a very popular museum.


National Museums Liverpool’s (NML) House of Memories initiative, which trains care workers to deliver reminiscence sessions using museum objects, is a good example of how museums can change people’s lives. The programme has been rolled out to other museums, and now an app has been launched to widen access to its resources even further.

My House of Memories (free on Google Play and the App Store) features social history objects that can prompt reminiscence between people with dementia and their families or carers.

The app has been designed with the specific needs of people with dementia in mind: music and videos provide multi-sensory experiences, written information is also available as spoken audio and users can choose to save objects onto a memory tree, box or timeline.

The content is Liverpool-centric, which might limit its appeal, and some photographs could be higher quality. Navigation is easy, although it’s hard to browse objects. But overall, this is a useful resource that enables NML to further the reach of its work beyond the walls of the museum.


Rebecca Atkinson is impressed by a site that provides a short history of the World Cup

Brazil 2014 may be a distant memory, but in the build up to Russia’s turn to host the World Cup in four years' time, interest in this international tournament is unlikely to die down.

The National Football Museum in Manchester has worked with football writer David Goldblatt and the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester, to identify 48 key objects from its collection that tell the history of the World Cup.

Unlike most other online exhibitions, the website uses Google’s Open Gallery platform to show high-quality photographs of objects, video content, maps and text.

The benefits of Open Gallery is that it makes it easy for museums to upload content, while users can use the zoom capacity to virtually explore objects in detail as they scroll through the web pages.

The Football Museum has chosen to split the history of the World Cup into two parts (1872-1970 and 1970-2014), which is a bit tiresome but does give people choice and avoids creating too long an exhibition. At times the design is a bit rough and ready – the maps overlap the text and the image captions are tricky to see.

But the objects on display are stunning and have interesting stories to tell – and I say that as someone who is lukewarm about the beautiful game. And the Open Gallery platform means that it is easy for the museum to add content and update it when England finally win the competition in 2018.