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- Computer Kiosks
- Posters
- Collections
- Historical Items
- Hands-on exhibits
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- Computer Kiosks
- Originally, this need be no more complicated than a surplused computer with a web browser, set to show your website as its home page. People can read about your organization, in your lobby, on the website you already have!
- Later, after you start enjoying the benefits of your kiosk, you can add quicktime movies, slide shows, audio files and other features to the computer, accessed through the same web browser familiar to many visitors.
- Posters
- Today's software and large-format printers can allow you to develop and print ultra-colorful, large-format posters that can be hung in your lobby. You could even install a "book-type" poster holder to hold many posters.
- Collections
- Quite possibly you've got a world-class collection in your departmental library or in bins and hoppers in a small room in your building, for the use of your graduate students and visiting scholars. Why not install a display case or two and exhibit some of these interesting and important items for your visitors as well?
- Historical Items
- Once it was state-of-the-art but now yesterdays research tool or instrument may be being kept around in a dusty closet or disused room for sentimental or historical reasons. Bring it out, clean it off, install some signs that show how it was used, place it next to a current-technology tool or instrument which does the same thing, set up a poster which compares the old way with the new. Make the history of your field come alive.
- Hands-on exhibits
- Probably the most sophisticated thing you can do in your Learning Lobby — no matter how clever your website — is to allow people to touch, feel, handle, manipulate, possibly even smell, sit on, sit in, wear or taste things that have to do with your field. It will enchant the kids and everyone will have a stronger memory of their visit. It will requires some thought, and of course it has to be safe and either durable or replenishable. If you're a food science department, the solution is simple give or sell our visitors something to eat.
- One important lesson is that whatever it is does not have to be totally and directly from your latest research. Sometimes and activity or sample that is analagous or only slightly related to what you do works wonders. At the University of Wisconsin Biotechnology Center, we give out small vials filled with visible pieces of dried salmon DNA. Nowhere in the building does anybody work with samples of DNA that large, but people are still fascinated to see — and handle — something that they previously only read about.
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