Erewash Museum

We bought InfoAktiv as part of a large Heritage Lottery Fund to help us interpret the house’s history for visitors. We liked it so much that we got another a year later for our War Room. One is in our tea room, providing fun content about Victorian cooking and domestic life. Another is in the entrance hall explaining the history of the house to Visitors. Our third unit is in the War Gallery and displays content about WW1 and WW2. This was great for the centenary of WW1 as we could use the pre-programmed content and have something interesting for our visitors immediately.

As part of our Lottery project we also installed 4 talking pictures to bring to life that characters who used to live in the house. We have a cook in the Victorian kitchen, a stable lad, farrier and a middle class girl telling their stories in the stable block. The visitors are totally captivated by these pictures, from the children to the adults, and it is such a creative way to tell these hidden stories. We have had no issues with the interactives- technically they are perfect. I would strongly recommend them to any museum considering how to display video and sound files to their visitors.

We have found InfoAktiv very reliable – we’ve never had a problem with anything! There are no mechanical issues, the system works just as it should. It is so easy to work with that when there was a small problem we just fixed it as we would fix small problems with our own PCs. It plays videos well, obviously text and images render really nicely. We’ve had to change some content around and we’ve found it exceptionally easy to add and develop our Power Points. Whenever we’ve needed some advice or wanted to try something new I’ve always found InfoAktiv helpful. It’s almost a shame we haven’t really needed to troubleshoot anything as I know we’d get the support we need! Our visitors love scrolling through the pages. Children often use the unit in the tea rooms and keep themselves amused for ages. It is great to be able to add so much content without having to create panel boards and find extra space on walls. We’ve used the units to develop little games and quizzes. My volunteers, who aren’t even that tech savvy, can just use PowerPoint to make things for display and they feel such ownership of the content

All in all I love the systems and would highly recommend them to another curator. They have such flexibility of functionality and I can’t wait to come up with more uses for them.

Kate Crossley – Collections Manager