Have you ever been to a museum or heritage site and been confronted with signage displaying essays of text, or videos hours long? How many people have hours to spend reading or watching this information. We always recommend that it’s better to have bite size amounts of interpretation that people will remember, than mountains that they’ll forget. This isn’t to say you can’t make lots of content available to the more studious of visitor, but this is where layering of content comes in. More on this a bit later.

They say a picture is worth a thousands words, so how many do you think a video is worth? Audio and Video interpretation when used well can really bring a subject to life. As AV experts we obviously have a huge range of products that can help you add audio or video to your heritage site available off-the-shelf on our store.

From archive footage to first person oral histories, sharing media with visitors is always a hit. You can utilise simple looping video screens to more impressive projector installations, the possibilities are endless and we’ll no doubt dig deeper into these options as this series continues. For now we’ll just make the point that a 30 second audio clip or a 1 minute video is capable of having a larger impact on visitors than 20 signs.

So you’ve made some interesting bitesize content but you now need to share it with visitors. Looping or push button content is a staple for many heritage sites, however a good trick to improve engagement is creating different ways for users to interact.

This can be something as simple as motion activated audio taking a visitor by surprise, or building handsets into interesting objects such as this example for Wirksworth Heritage Centre. Here our Heavy Duty Handsets were converted into unique objects that when raised to the ear would trigger audio content, such as a shoe or sweet jar lids.