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Historic Front Pages Touchscreen Application

Education | Entertainment | Museum

There's more to every story, but to tell their many stories in a more efficient manner, the Newseum in Washington D.C. partnered with Balance Studios. The unique museum, known for promoting free expression and first amendment rights, updates the front pages of 800 newspapers worldwide every single day. That's a lot of data from a lot of sources.

Before Balance, the staff would manually update kiosks, throughout the impressive seven-level institution, using USB drives to download the day's latest front-page content. The team at Balance developed a customized content management system (CMS) to streamline the process and enable the Newseum staff to update all of the day's information from one source efficiently and easily. The front pages populate in every kiosk with one source and can be done with by someone with limited expertise in technical applications. The result: the institution saving lots of time and resources. Now that's extra worthy of front-page news!

Project image — left
Project image — right

The Idea

To create interactive kiosks for one of the most interactive museums in the world and provide them with the capabilities to manage their immense data filing and updating system.

Services

Helping to elevate an already highly-regarded institution is what we do best. By cultivating strong relationships with our client-partners, we invest the time to gain a complete understanding of how we can help the storytellers connect with their audiences. And helping to curate and archive pieces of history so content is easily managed and updated, ensures that more chapters can be added, and the stories can keep coming. 

The Result

Visitors flocked to the interactive to easily page through the hundreds of historic newspapers.




“We engaged Balance Studios because we were struggling with a museum interactive with an old public interface and back-end database that was becoming impossible to update and we needed to make some major updates because we were overhauling the exhibit content that the interactive supports.

Balance Studios helped with this project by reimagining both the public interface and the backend CMS.

The result was an incredibly user friendly, both for the museum visitor exploring our content and the staff entering data. Not only is the Historic Newspaper Interactive easy to use, it is also beautiful; we were particularly pleased with the way it draws from the colors and design of the larger gallery design to become a cohesive part of the overall space.

The experience was so satisfying that just a few months after this project was completed we decided to work with Balance Studios again on another kiosk project that provides visitors with an entirely different front end experience. Balance Studios was able to repurpose the CMS they had just built to power a new kind of kiosk with an entirely different purpose and design. It was incredibly valuable that the staff didn’t need to learn and entirely new system and still got a great new product.

We would recommend Balance Studio to people who need creative solutions to content management problems…and are hoping to accomplish it in an user-friendly way with an engaged and supportive team.”

~Carrie Christoffersen, Executive Director and Curator, Newseum

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