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PLANNING AND CREATING EFFECTIVE EXHIBITS ON A LIMITED BUDGET By James C. Oda, Curator, Piqua Historical Museum, Piqua Local History Notebook, July / August 1994 Planning and building museum exhibits can be a daunting experience, particularly for a small all-volunteer organization. Resources are usually stretched thin in terms of time, money, and labor. Fixing the roof or upgrading the plumbing usually seem more important and, those types of projects inevitably pull the museum volunteers away from the exhibit-building process. So what can we do? Ignore repairing the roof? Certainly not! But we can look for easier, cheaper, and more effective ways to present and preserve our physical heritage. We need to make exhibit construction one of our priorities. Remember that no matter how good our restrooms look, we will be judged by our exhibits. The key to a successful organization is to have nice facilities as well as a good exhibits program. For the purposes of this "Notebook," exhibits will be defined as planned, visual presentations aimed at educating and entertaining our visitors. Exhibits will be limited in this discussion to temporary exhibits designed for use during one or two seasons. The last limitation will be cost. Throughout, the emphasis will be on volunteer planning and in-house construction.An Exhibit: What is It? Many small historical societies with artifact collections have an open storage exhibits program. Open storage means that everything the organization owns is displayed with only limited emphasis on telling the stories of the past. An exhibit is a conscious effort to use past objects to educate the public about a specific historical subject. The exhibit is themed and has interpretative labels stating the theme, identifying individual artifacts, and descriptions that tell the story. Open storage museums display artifacts; themed exhibits teach important history lessons. Planning Your Exhibit The planning stage of exhibit construction can be the most exciting part of the entire exhibit creating process. Start by putting together an exhibit committee of six to eight people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. Diversity will help the ideas flow and keep exhibits from becoming too static. Look outside the museum or society board for committee members. Ask a local union, school, or civic organization to send a representative to sit in on your initial planning sessions. This not only brings in new ideas, but also broadens your support in the community. Make sure that all of your committee members, both new and old, have a copy of your organization's mission statement. This procedure helps everyone to understand the purpose and function of the organization. Deciding what to exhibit can depend on many different factors. The mission statement confines the exhibit interpretation to the history of your area, defined by space and time. With this in mind, begin your first exhibit committee meeting with a little pre-meeting work. Using published local and regional histories establishes a timeline for your community or region. List the significant local events, such as births and deaths, celebrations and disasters, and beginnings and endings, as well as state and national events that have influenced your area, such as the founding of your county and Ohio, the Civil War, the Prohibition Era, Great Depression, Second World War, and the Civil Rights movements. Try to keep this list to a couple of pages. The purpose of the timeline is to provide the entire committee with a succinct overview of your local history. It will also serve as a reminder of how complex and intriguing local history can be. At the committee’s first meeting, use the timeline to try to establish significant, unusual, or fun anniversaries. For example, in 1994 the local post office building will be fifty years old; community founder and distillery owner Obadia Neuenschwander died one hundred seventy-five years ago; or the first school house was built one hundred and fifty years ago this year. Anniversaries make wonderful exhibit ideas. They also make future advertising and promotion campaigns more effective. Do not overlook the less obvious anniversaries. The local shoelace factory was founded in 1944. Fifty years of well-laced footwear can provide the museum with some good exhibit ideas, not to mention the opening of new channels for artifacts and/or funding. The same concept will work with lodges, clubs, and associations, public works systems, transportation, and more. Exhibit ideas might include the first street paving (look for bricks the next time the streets are repaved), the first sanitary sewer (an old piece of pipe or manhole cover can help to describe this theme), or the day the last train went through the area (railroad ties are not difficult to find). After the exhibit committee finishes its first meeting using the timeline and anniversary ideas, it might be advantageous to switch gears a bit for the second meeting. Try working on topical exhibit ideas. This angle works well for all those areas that do not fit neatly into timelines or have clearly-defined anniversaries. Topical exhibit ideas are almost limitless. They can cover anything from office buildings to agriculture, from home building to sports or music. At this point in the planning process, nothing is too big or too obscure. By the end of the second brainstorming session, you should have a strong nucleus of exhibit ideas. The more diverse your committee, the wider the range of ideas that can be generated. People with a wide range of backgrounds are the mainstay of every community or area. Your exhibit ideas should reflect your area's uniqueness and diversity. When you celebrate the founding of a major industry, do not neglect the unions that were founded with it. The well-known opera house in the center of town could share space with the houses of less than sterling reputations located next to the railroad tracks. The devastating flood can be commemorated as well as the political controversy that the flood control plan created. It is important to plan exhibits that highlight and even glorify the tremendous achievements of your community. It is also important to remember and preserve the less than positive aspects of the community. By all means plan an exhibit around the construction of the courthouse, which describes political history, but also plan to represent the indignities of the Klu Klux Klan, the destruction of a wet- lands habitat, or the ethnic intolerance generated by World War I propaganda. We have a moral and educational obligation to present a wide ranging portrait of our community or region. We do not have to present everything all at once. Remember that one advantage of temporary exhibits is that they give us the opportunity to provide a wide variety of ideas over the period of several years. What happens when the timeline/anniversary or topical brainstorming simply do not produce any meaningful results? In that case a jump start is needed, something to generate some creative thinking. The committee might try selecting about a dozen or so smaller artifacts from the collection and start planning exhibits around them. This is not the time to be too literal. Look at the artifacts from as many different perspectives as possible. For example, the committee hauls out one of the museum's cast iron cooking skillets. The group might suggest an exhibit featuring the manufacturer of this locally or regionally produced skillet. A second member might suggest a late nineteenth-century general cooking exhibit. Someone else might want to go back to the idea of the production of the skillet, but concentrate on the workers rather than the company itself. Another committee member might comment on the weight of the skillet, and the group could begin exploring an exhibit idea focusing on the hard physical labor involved in housekeeping in the nineteenth century. This, in turn, takes the group into a discussion of the use of domestic servants among the upper class in the area. After that third cup of coffee, another committee member casually mentions how much easier modem skillets are to use compared to the cast iron skillets. Suddenly the committee has hit on a comparison exhibit between cast iron and teflon-coated cooking skillets or between a skillet on a wood burning stove and a ceramic plate in a microwave oven. The discussion then turns to comparing homemade ingredients prepared in the skillet and frozen prepackaged meals. The point of all this is the importance of the general flow or exchange of ideas. Let yourselves go and see what you can imagine. Keep in mind that your ideas do not need to be practical or inexpensive. Let the ideas flow and consider the limitations and details later. Throughout this initial phase, the exhibit committee chairperson should be aware of a few obstacles that might jeopardize the work of the committee. First, he or she should make sure that the discussions and ideas are wide-ranging and that everyone participates. Remember to keep things simple and varied. Try not to let the committee get too bogged down with details or spend too much time on one topic or era. Finally, the chairperson should make sure that the committee does not get too serious at this stage. Have some fun with history. Occasionally we need to utilize history's bizarre or unusual events because oftentimes visitors remember museums more for their serendipity rather than their stem intellect. If the above methods to do not generate enough ideas, try to bring in an outside facilitator. This would be someone who would guide the discussion and try to get the ideas flowing. The ideas and suggestions, however, must still come from the exhibit committee itself. The Local History Office of the Ohio Historical Society will be glad to help you find a facilitator for your group discussions.Narrowing the Topics The next phase of exhibit planning brings us back to pragmatic realities. The exhibit committee must now winnow the hundreds of exhibit ideas down to a manageable few. This is usually a good time to establish a long-range exhibit plan which includes a detailed outline of the exhibits that the historical society wants to build over the next several years and the projected cost for construction of those exhibits. The questions now are how do we narrow the field of ideas so that the long-range plan is realistic and how do we decide which exhibit ideas are the best ones? The preliminary sorting is usually the easiest. It will be almost immediately apparent that not all the ideas can be used for exhibits. Sometimes the concepts are simply too large. "The history of religion in the world and its impact on society" might not fit on a single four by seven foot panel board. However, the history and development of pioneer churches in your own area might be a workable idea. The committee might also try to break a very broad topic down into smaller, more digestible pieces. For example local religious growth might be divided into specific congregational histories, the changes in church architecture, and the importance of various church organizations in community charitable activities.Artifacts and the Exhibit Some exhibit ideas might at first seem impractical due to a lack of physical artifacts. This could be a daunting problem. Exhibits are much more successful if three-dimensional objects can be mixed with other non-artifact items, such as photographic images, line drawings, explanatory label copy, background music, newspaper articles from the area, or quotes from oral history interviews. But sometimes it appears that there simply are no artifacts that can be used for the exhibit. In that case, you have to be creative. For example, what do you do if there is nothing left of the old District School No. 5 but a single photograph of an 1898 group of students? To get around that problem try visiting the site of the former school and see if you can locate a brick, a board, shingle, or even a rusted door hinge. Any piece of the building will enhance and strengthen the visual appeal of your exhibit. On the other hand, when there are no physical artifacts available, the committee might consider a generic exhibit. This type of exhibit provides your museum visitors with the feel of a particular topic or period without actually providing a real-life example of it. The 1898 school photograph could be combined with other generic period artifacts like a free standing school desk, text books, or a chalk board to explain the story of rural education at the turn of the century. Museums today frequently use generic exhibits to showcase a variety of artifacts in the setting of a "typical" Victorian parlor, children's toy room, general store, or blacksmith shop. You do need to be cautious with this type of exhibit. Remember that the general public believes that what you present exemplifies historical reality, which is why it is important to provide proper labeling that explains that the exhibit is only a representation and not an actual recreation.A few of the committee’s ideas will turn out to be impractical because of the limitations of the artifacts themselves. For instance, artifact condition is a major factor. Artifacts that are too fragile or in need of massive conservation work should not be included in an active exhibit. One exception might be the use of an actual artifact restoration project as an exhibit in and of itself. The process of restoration can be both instructive and entertaining for the museum visitors. Another artifact limitation factor is size. What do you do with an exhibit where the artifacts to be used are simply too big or too heavy for your exhibit space? One solution is to use only part of the artifact. If the vintage 1915 automobile will not fit through the door, try using the spare tire to represent the physical presence of the auto. Parts can often be just as effective as the whole. This solution also provides flexibility when space is a major consideration. It is also important to remember that the part alone will not tell much of a story. Supplement the exhibit with photographs, excerpts from oral histories where people talked about their favorite car back then, fun music from the era, examples of the clothing men and women wore when they went out for a spin, descriptions of the roads people drove on, and possibly advertisements showing the variety of cars available to people in 1915.Exhibit Titles After using a few of these criteria to narrow down your exhibit ideas, the next step is to provide each exhibit idea with a specific title. This will help keep you focused on the purpose of the exhibit. If your exhibit has a religious theme, you can begin with a generic name like "Early Church Structures." After your exhibit work has progressed a bit, try to be a little more creative with the title and give the exhibit a personality. For example, you might try using a title like "A Brick and a Prayer." You will find that the exhibit will begin to take on the personality of its title. Boring titles often lead to dry and predictable exhibits. Try to limit the informational aspects of the exhibit to a subtitle such as "A Brick and a Prayer: Smithville Churches, 1820 Through 1870." The more fun you have with the title, the more fun the visitor will have with the exhibit. Researching the Topic The next step in the exhibit planning process calls for extensive research. For any exhibit subject matter, the committee should try to find answers to the standard who, what, why, when, and how questions. This should be done by a small, two or three person, subcommittee. Research will provide you with a solid background on your exhibit topic and place it in the general context of local and national history. The material you uncover can be used to provide effective labeling. If a surplus of information is uncovered, you might consider putting out a simple one-page pamphlet or fact sheet to go along with the exhibit. This could be made available free of charge in a holder at the exhibit site, or, for a small nominal fee, at your registration desk or gift area. Research can not only provide background data, it can also produce a number of previously undiscovered sources of exhibit materials. For example, when doing research on a public works theme, your committee might uncover living relatives of the region's first sanitary engineer. Photographs of a sanitary engineer at work are often treasures only a family would keep. In another case, while researching community founder Obadiah Neuenschwander, you have found that no known drawings or paintings of the man exist. However, he did own ten thousand acres of land in the township and all the land where the village now stands. Photocopying, enlarging, and mounting a copy of a deed with Mr. Neuenschwander's signature on it would make a good exhibit item. A modern map of the township with Neuenschwander's land holdings colored in would help tie this pioneer landowner to the modem growth and development of the area. A common complaint is that researching can be terribly time consuming. Why should the committee spend more time researching the exhibit than it does building it? Because the rewards from research can be considerable. As exhibit researchers, you are responsible for putting your exhibit idea into a new historical context. You are also responsible for creating a new educational tool. The key to a successful exhibit is its ability to make the museum visitor look at history in a slightly different way. Some examples of creative exhibit ideas that help the visitor look at history in a different way are as follows:• A transportation theme that shows how technological advances made it possible for rural Americans to escape isolation.--"From Buggy Whips to Steering Wheels" • A religious theme that indicates how various denominations brought new ethnic groups to the area.--"Moved By Faith" • A business theme that shows how corporate monopolies led to the demise of the local brewery and automobile factory at the turn of the century.--“Last Call" • A public works theme that demonstrates how streets, water lines, sewage lines, and lighting have led to a better quality of life in the village.--“From Outhouse to In-House" Research gives you the power to develop themes and create meaningful themes that have educational value. And, by bringing out the entire historical context, you make your exhibit tell not only the local story of pioneer Smithville, but also how Smithville's growth compared to other villages in the state and nation. Research also ensures that the information in your exhibit is accurate. The exhibit should have a point of view with a meaningful story and should not have any mistakes. There is nothing more embarrassing than on the day the exhibit is opened, a visitor points out mistakes in dates or detail. Research may take a long time, but the results pay for themselves.Suggestions for Further Reading The following can be obtained through the Ohio Historical Society's Local History Office Lending Library: Carol Kammen. On Doing Local History: Reflections on What Local Historians Do, Why, and What It Means. Nashville: AASLH, 1986. George W. Knepper. Ohio and Its People. Kent, OH: Kent. State University Press, 1989. Arminta Neal. Exhibits for the Small Museum: A Handbook. Nashville: AASLH, 1976. Arminta Neal. Help for the Small Museum: Handbook of Exhibit Ideas and Methods. Nashville, AASLH, 1987. Patrick Norris. History by Design: A Primer on Interpreting and Exhibiting Community History. Austin, TX: Texas Association for Museums, 1985. Lothar P. Witteborg. Good Show! A Practical Guide for Temporary Exhibitions. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1981. The Local History Notebook is edited and published by the Ohio Historical Society's Local History Office in order to bring useful information to people working in the local history field. The selection of subjects and authors is based on the OAHSM Editorial Board's and the Local History Office's determination of issues which are timely in nature and lasting in scope. The reference inserts are copyrighted @ 1994 by the Ohio Historical Society. Reprints are available; please specify volume and number. For further information, contact: Local History OfficeOhio Historical Society 1982 Velma Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43211 Phone: (614) 297-2340 Toll-free: (800) 858-6878 Fax: (614) 297-2318 oahsm@ohiohistory.org 
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