The most-visited room in the most-visited science museum in the world reopened last week after a massive, five year renovation. Deep Time, as the new gallery is colloquially known, is the latest iteration of the Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

It might not seem like much in geologic time, but the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has been welcoming visitors for more than 100 years. Over those years, the dinosaur bones and other fossils—even some individual specimens—have remained at the center, even as the museum presentation around them has changed dramatically. You can measure the change by the different names of the hall through time. What is today Deep Time first opened in 1911 with a different name: The Hall of Extinct Monsters. 

In this episode, we’re going back in time through the iterations of the Fossil Hall with Ben Miller, an exhibitions developer at the Field Museum in Chicago. From its opening as The Hall of Extinct Monsters in 1911, to renovations in the 1960s and 1980s, to the forceful climate crisis message of 2019’s Deep Time gallery, the Smithsonian Fossil Hall has answered life’s biggest questions. This is the story of how museum workers shrugged off their “cabinet of curiosity” roots and embraced education-oriented exhibits like what we see in the gallery today.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.


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66. From ‘Extinct Monsters’ to ‘Deep Time’: A History of the Smithsonian Fossil Hall

A tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Museum Archipelago believes that no museum is an island and that museums are not neutral.  
Taking a broad definition of museums, host Ian Elsner brings you to different museum spaces around the world, dives deep into institutional problems, and introduces you to the people working to fix them. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let’s get started.

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While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg recognized the institution's limited capacity to develop new digitals exhibits  with the proprietary solutions that are common in big museums. This challenge led Rehnberg to start work on Exhibitera, a free, open-source suite of software tools tailored for museum exhibit control that took advantage of the touch screens and computers that the museum already had. 

Today, as Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Rehnberg continues to refine and expand Exhibitera, which he previously called Constellation. The software is crafted to enable institutions to independently create, manage, and update their interactive exhibits, even between infrequent retrofits. The overarching goal is to make sure that smaller museum’s aren’t “left in the 20th century” or reliant on costly bespoke interactive software solutions.

Exhibitera is used in Fort Worth and Nashville and available to download. In this episode, Rehnberg shares his journey of creating Exhibitera to tackle his own issues, only to discover its broader applicability to numerous museums.

Image: Screenshot from a gallery control panel in Exhibitera

Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Computer Interactives in Museums
01:00 Dr. Morgan Rehnberg
01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini
02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville
03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums
05:00 Solving Your Own Problems
06:30 Exhibitera
07:45 “A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit”
08:30 Built-In Multi-Language Support
09:30 Open Source Exhibit Management
10:30 Why Open Source?
12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum
13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 

105. Building a Better Visitor Experience with Open Source Software

The Murney Tower Museum in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits.

Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor has dedicated her studies to understanding the unique dynamics and challenges faced by small museums, and is also the Murney Tower Museum’s sole full-time employee. 

In this episode, Dr. Erdogan-O'Connor describes the operation of The Murney Tower Museum, discusses the economic models of small museums, and muses on what small museums can teach larger ones.

Image: Murney Tower Museum

Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Understanding the Landscape of Small Museums
02:38 Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor
03:00 Murney Tower Museum
08:29 Overcoming Challenges with Digital Solutions
09:46 What Big Institutions Can Learn from Small Museums
09:54 The Power of Local Connections in Small Museums
13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 

104. What Large Institutions Can Learn From Small Museums

Computing work keeps museums running, but it’s largely invisible. That is, unless something goes wrong. For Dr. Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and his colleague Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes activities of museum technology workers was one of the main reasons to start the Oral Histories of Museum Computing project.

The first museum technology conference was hosted in 1968 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This prescient event, titled “Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums” was mostly focused on the cutting edge: better inventory management systems using computers instead of paper methods. However, it also foresaw the transformative impact of computers on museums—from digital artifacts to creating interactive exhibits to expanding audience reach beyond physical boundaries. Most of all, speakers understood that museum technologists would need to “join forces” with each other to learn and experiment better ways to use computers in museum settings.

The Oral Histories of Museum Computing project collects the stories of what happened since that first museum technology conference, identifying the key historical themes, trends, and people behind the machines behind the museums. In this episode, Paul Marty and Kathy Jones describe their experience as museum technology professionals, the importance of conferences like the Museum Computer Network, and the benefits of compiling and sharing these oral histories.

Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums
00:43 Thomas P. F. Hoving Closing Statements
01:41 Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University
02:11 Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School
02:18 Museum Computing from There to Here
04:08 The First Steps of Museum Computing
04:52 Early Challenges in Museum Databases Like GRIPHOS
07:00 Changing Field, Changing Profession
08:48 The Oral Histories of Museum Computing Project
11:32 Reflecting on the Journey of Museum Technology
14:12 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 

103. How Computers Transformed Museums and Created A New Type of Professional

On Berlin’s Museum Island, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago.

Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun has heard a range of negative visitor reactions to this copy — from disappointment to feeling tricked — and engages visitors to think more deeply about copies. As an archeologist and art historian, Durgun is fascinated by the cultural attitude and history of copies: the stories they tell about their creators’ values, how they can be used to keep original objects in situ, and their role in repatriation or restitution cases.

In this episode, Durgun describes the ways that museum visitors’ perception of authenticity has changed over time, how replicas jump-started museum collections in the late 19th-century, and some of the ethical implications of copies in museums.

Image: Reconstructed Lion Sculpture Sam'al near modern Zincirli Höyük, Turkey 10th-8th century BCE by Mary Harrsch

Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Sam’al/Zincirli Lions
01:09 Pinar Durgun
01:22 Museum Island
01:40 Find Divison
02:28 Gipsformerei
03:12 Replicas Jump-Started Museum Collections
04:35 Trending Away from Copies
05:27 When Visitors Feel Tricked
06:00 When Visitors Are Okay With Copies
07:28 Ancient Cultural Contexts About Copies
08:07 Hokusai’s Great Wave
08:35 “Immersive Experiences” Made Up of Digital Copies
09:08 Digital Copies
12:39 Museum Archipelago 97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does.
13:32 How Should Museums Present Copies in Their Collections? 
14:36 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 

102. Copies in Museums

Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration. 

But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation.

But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.

In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform.

Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov

Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience. 
01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains”
02:40 The Original Visitor Experience
03:02 Dora Ivanova
03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47
03:35 Entering the Building
04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof
05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves
06:25 The Inner Mosaics 
07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show
08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation
09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation
10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform
11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built
12:30 Acting before memory becomes history
13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary
14:05 The Panoramic Corridor
15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society
16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum
17:20 The preservation as proof of change
18:05 “Buzludzha is about change”
19:15 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 

66. From ‘Extinct Monsters’ to ‘Deep Time’: A History of the Smithsonian Fossil Hall

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