Museums receive grants to add technology

By Jim Stafford

Published: April 2, 2008

Three Oklahoma City museums won $100,000 in AT&T Foundation grants Tuesday that will enable visitors to embark on virtual tours of their displays, take a "cell phone” tour and create multimedia oral histories.

The grants were presented by AT&T Oklahoma President Don Cain to directors of the Gaylord-Pickens Oklahoma Heritage Museum, the Oklahoma Museum of Art and the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum.

"These three organizations have developed programs that are noteworthy for their innovative and creative approach to using wireless and broadband technologies,” Cain said.

The Oklahoma Heritage Museum was awarded a $50,000 grant to train teachers to use technology in their Oklahoma history curriculum.

As the grant ceremony was under way on the museum's fourth floor Tuesday morning, a group of state teachers were learning how to create multimedia oral histories in a classroom two floors below.

"They actually take the process of digital storytelling back to the classroom so their students can preserve oral history,” said Shannon Nance, president of the Oklahoma Heritage Museum.

The museum's oral history initiative includes a project to collect oral histories from students across the state and archive them for future generations, Nance said.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum won a $25,000 grant to create a "cell phone” tour of its grounds. Visitors to the museum's outside displays will be able to use their cell phones to dial a special number and hear a narration about an aspect of the display such as the Survivor Tree, said Kari Watkins, executive director.

"It will say ‘push 4' and it will tell them about the Survivor Tree or ‘push 2' and it will tell them about the chairs,” Watkins said. "We've asked Tom Brokaw to do the introduction to this because he was a major icon from the media perspective of this event. He continues to talk about it and write about.”

The Oklahoma City Museum of Art won a $25,000 grant to create a virtual tour of the museum and establish two interactive stations for visitors.

The virtual tour and the interaction stations will allow museum visitors to explore areas of their own choosing, said Carolyn Hill, executive director.

"The message that we are getting is that they want options, they want the options of how they learn,” Hill said. "So they can go at this level and perhaps a little more deeply here and more deeply there. The beautiful thing about it is that we can increase electronic visitorship, and we can complement what onsite actual visitorship does because of technology.”

The AT&T Foundation is AT&T's philanthropic arm.

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