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Audio guides can serve as a useful tool for showcasing a range of voices, highlighting archival media from your collections, making your galleries relevant to wider audiences, and adding new interpretation in a relatively quick and inexpensive way. In this session, we’ll explore how small museums can leverage audio guides to create flexible, radical, and accessible interpretive content. We will review logistical considerations such as the technical skills, software, and budget required to implement an audio guide, as well as more philosophical approaches to this topic.
This panel moderated by Auni Gelles of the Baltimore Museum of Industry will include three representatives discussing best practices related to accessibility (Lindsey Baker, Co-Founder, Baker Cruz Services and Executive Director, Maryland Humanities; Jeff Danziger, Sales Director ‑ North America, Guide ID; Kathleen L. Brockway, deaf author and scholar) and two colleagues sharing award-winning case studies (Amber N. Mitchell, Director of Education, Whitney Plantation; Michelle Martz Easley, Visitor Engagement Manager, Lincoln’s Cottage).
The first portion of the panel will focus on accessibility. We’ll discuss how audio guides can serve visitors of different ages, languages, and abilities and review best practices in translations and transcriptions. The second portion will look at two audio guides developed by small museums. The staff of Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, DC have developed a unique approach to interpreting the landscape around the historic site using mindfulness techniques, reflection, and traditions from the native people who lived there before Lincoln. The Whitney Plantation, the only plantation site in Louisiana dedicated to sharing the history of American chattel slavery from the enslaved perspective, won a 2021 MUSE award from AAM for their Acoustiguide mobile experience, which was the primary method for tours throughout the pandemic. The final part of the discussion will include time for questions and insights from the audience.
