What I'm working with...

According to my research--and I've been doing a lot over the last three days--the worst possible museum is stuff in glass cases labeled "don't touch".

This is what I'm working with.

And it is entirely glass cases labeled don't touch.

The Space Junk Room

Parts of STS-121 (An ISS mission)

 Not just space junk--which, by the way, is pretty much completely unorganised to the point that I found a computer with a sign next to it labeled "Touch screen to begin your tour!"...that was nowhere near any of the entrances to the room. Geez.

The Rock, Fossil, Meteorite Room

This picture is a panorama, which makes it look considerably larger than it actually is, but I wanted to show the whole room. This is slightly better organised--it's organised by collections, which were donated by a bunch of different people, and also by the type of thing. You can tell what belongs to what collection by the labels--some are typewritten, some handwritten, some laser printed; the meteorites are along the right wall, fossils appear along the left, rocks are everywhere else. (It's labeled in my diagram at the start of this post.)

On a different note--I've been going through a book less about science centres, more about how to create exhibits today. I learned some interesting things about how visitors learn from museums:

1. Visitors bring their experiences, background, prior knowledge (or lack thereof), and misconceptions to the museum with them. A lesser part of my job, I think, will be to notice when we have visitors (there are a handful every day, despite how isolated PARI is) and ask them what they expect from the museum, what they're interested in, and what they hoped to get from coming. 
2. Visitors only learn as much as they want to learn from a museum. It's their choice to engage in the exhibits...or, read the placards as things now stand. It would also be nice for me to know enough about the museum to talk to them about anything they're interested in when they wander through now, especially if they're not on a planned tour. It gives me a chance to get out of the Intern Enclosure (that's a thing), so win-win.
3. Learning only happens when visitors care enough to bother learning. The topic at hand must therefore feel interesting and relevant. Also known as, nobody is getting much from the three different types of space-end antennae with wall-of-text style labels. (They're not the sort that interfaced with the giant telescopes. They're more recent, Space-Shuttle era stuff. They actually kiiiind of helped take Rosman Tracking Station offline, because they interface with satellites instead of ground-based stations.) 

   

   These.

Not these.

It's also worth noting that what I come up with will last for ~3 years, or until they have the funding to build an actual museum building. Guess what launched 47 years ago?

One Small Step...

Apollo 11. The first man on the moon. That one. We apparently have a model Lunar Excursion Module (the tin-foil-looking spidery thing you've probably seen somewhere.) It's about the size of the satellite--think "large fridge"--and currently largely disassembled in a mostly-empty warehouse (although they were going to put the faraday cage there today, so maybe it's less empty now) near a seismograph and a flock of turkeys. 

So. 

I think 50th anniversary celebrations would be interesting, especially if I can prove Rosman was involved somehow...