Museums could generate a whole new experience for visitors with more information about exhibits.

Many museums have already invested heavily in technology to provide their visitors with the best experience they can. Considering the number of exhibits and the sheer volume of information, entertaining technologies such as voice and video can seem an insurmountable challenge. Still, more than 20 years ago the Mercedes Automotive museum in Stuttgart, Germany, provided visitors with a radio-based device that delivered information in your selected language as you approached each automobile. Not only can TAG can provide a similar experience but also by its very nature it is far better suited to interacting with existing catalogues and text based information.

While possible, it could be both impractical and prohibitively expensive to attempt to TAG every single item in a museums catalogue. Over time, it may have benefits but as a starting point, it would make much more sense to attach TAGs to displays instead. Since records of displays are already maintained, connecting a given display to its information is just a matter of reference and references are what TAG is all about.

To clarify TAGs advantage, consider the above concept. Let's put a barcodes directly on Display Case 24. For the TAG we can use a reference of "../display24/Egyptian_exhibit/KingTutMask" but if we want to reuse the other types we'd need to title them as "../display24" only, since our title can never change once created. To be fair, both can be used to redirect to other information, so the consumer's viewpoint is unchanged but the efficiency of metrics is improved by TAG. In creating a logical mapping between display 24 and the instant exhibit, a secondary lookup table is unnecessary and there is a lower potential for error.

Now you could encode the same information in a QR code to gain the efficiency but then you'd need to replace the code when you change the exhibit. However, if at some point you decide to use Display 24 to share a page from the "Book of the Dead", then you can update the TAG at its source to "../display24/egyptian_exhibit/KingTutMask_DeadBookPage". In the other case, you need to revise a secondary reference to "Display 24" and record timestamps to ensure a valid data range and yes it can be done but less efficiently.

On a less technical note, since the TAG's reference can be changed at will, they can accommodate changes to the physical exhibits or revisions to content equally well. This translates into improved flexibility and lower costs than their counterparts do. As we have noted elsewhere, TAG is programmable and can therefore be made to integrate into existing systems. If you envision that with other barcodes, we can only wish you the best of luck.

Some museums have located voice and video devices next to exhibits to provide additional information but in those cases, cost is a factor limiting the number of devices that can be deployed. Using TAG eliminates that cost since it will work with any visitor's mobile phone. This reduces the cost of implementing such systems substantially. The voice and video content must still be created but museums could also consider using existing information, extending the value of their catalog itself. In any event, removing the device costs can free up a lot of budget for content.