Thursday, August 20, 2009

Advice for Audio Guides?

A colleague of Al’s in the Tidewater area is looking at initiating an audio guide at their site, and would like to talk to a few sites who have done this successfully (or not, as the case may be—sometimes as important a lesson). Do any of you have suggestions as to who she should talk to?

Any ideas are welcome—thanks!!

Jennifer

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We are in the process of putting one together in-house as we speak with off-the-shelf MP3 players and in-house recorded audio. After we saw the costs of Acoustiguide and others, we picked our selves off the floor and are doing it ourselves. The added bonus is the making snipets of the tour available for download off our website (pod cast-style) for folks who can't visit in person but want to have an educational experience.

- Sean

Anonymous said...

I understand that there are cell phone guides that are very inexpensive, anyone have any information on them?
- Bill

Anonymous said...

The two companies are Guide by Cell (guidebycell.com), and On Cell, (oncellsystems.com). I’m guessing both of those companies have clients in Virginia as well, and they are usually very willing to share their client list so you can talk to other folks who have used them.

- Jennifer

Anna Holloway said...

We've been working with Guide By Cell and they have been great! I'm hoping to expand what we do with them as soon as we can get better cell reception to some of our interior galleries. Currently we have one cell phone tour for our USS Monitor replica and are working on one for our International Small Craft Center. It's really easy to use. Feel free to contact me at aholloway@MarinersMuseum.org if you have questions.

Anonymous said...

We tested the idea of an audio with visitors though random sample survey. Our plan was to defray cost by a low charge probably around a dollar. Our visitors were not interested audio tours by an overwhelming percentage and were even less interested in paying an extra fee. We had been talking with Acoustiguide before we learned the results

- Joe