22″ Freestanding Kiosk with Lightbox 3 – Oldham Archives

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What we like about the kiosk is the range of things we can do with it. It’s not just about making our sound recordings accessible. We can link those recordings to images, digitised documents and moving image footage to tell a story and make people more aware of the breadth of our collections.

– Jan Hicks, Archivist for Oldham Council

Freestanding Kiosk in use at Oldham Archives

Oldham Archives were looking for a way to share digitised elements of their collection with visitors, Jan Hicks (Archivist for Oldham Council) explains the project here;

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Oldham Archives is part of a Greater Manchester-wide partnership of archive and local studies services, which already has a 22” Multi Touch Kiosk (from Blackbox-av). We were so impressed by the kiosk and its functionality that, when we were fitting out our new archive service location, we decided to buy our own. We approached Blackbox-av for a quote to supply us with an identical kiosk to the Greater Manchester one.

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The ordering process and delivery went smoothly and Blackbox-av provided remote support when we came to unbox and set up the kiosk. We put the kiosk into use at our Open Day… with a selection of three sound clips from our digitised Oral History collections and used an existing PowerPoint slide show of images for the Welcome page… We plan to add collections to the kiosk over time, which will be themed on subjects and places using our oral history collection and associated digital or digitised archive material.

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We will add a collection relating to the 150th Anniversary of the Oldham Rugby League Football Club to accompany a small display in our exhibition case and a larger exhibition at Gallery Oldham… The collection will remain on the kiosk for the whole of [next year] and will include interviews with past players, images from the archive and a short film celebrating the anniversary.

All of this is made possible thanks to our in-house developed Lightbox 3 software – designed with the museum and heritage industry in mind. Lightbox 3 allows places just like the Oldham Archives to build their own interactives from existing (or newly produced) materials, easily creating new collections over time and adjusting the content on display whenever required, all thanks to the easy to use Content Management System.

It’s always wonderful seeing it put to good use, especially with Oldham Archives having clear plans for the kiosk and software combo for the years ahead.