We love our museum, but like a lot of the things we love, we know it’s got some issues. When you walk through the doors of Hennepin History Museum, you’re confronted with a staircase. For some visitors, it’s not a big deal, but for others it’s like the Brady Street hill at the BIX 7 Road Race. Maybe it was already tough to get here and then we hit you with some stairs as soon as you get through the door. I have seen this turn people away. All jokes aside, the stairs are an obstacle for many people. We’re working on being more accessible, but in the mean time, we have partnered with Bloomberg Connects to bring museum content to you wherever you are.
Something New
We’ve added a digital guide to our offerings. Bloomberg Connects is a platform that facilitates free digital guides for museums and cultural institutions. Through a mobile device or computer, you can see our current exhibits, listen to oral history excerpts, and get a glimpse of our most historically valuable artifacts and archival items. You can find our guide here and download the app with this QR.
Why Bloomberg Connects
Last fall I was looking for another platform to make our oral histories more easily accessible. We have a number of great oral histories that can be easily accessed on mncollections.org, but informing visitors about them in-house posed a marketing challenge. We thought we needed more than our website to get the word out about these great narratives. We were also looking for a virtual exhibit option. I went browsing for a low to no-cost solution and came across Bloomberg Connects on an archival supplier’s website. I watched a webinar that answered my initial questions and believe me when I say that the platform looked too good to be true:
- FREE, as in no cost ever
- Free marketing
- Well Supported
- Worldwide usage
- Video and audio uploads
- Free training to build the app
When Bloomberg Connects confirmed that we keep all rights to our material and that they would need our permission to use anything from our page…I thought YES! But Why? Mike Bloomberg, yes, former New York City Mayor and billionaire founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies, experienced the intersection of history and technology while visiting a cultural institution and was inspired to spread the love.
As it turns out, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the organization under which Bloomberg Connects operates, has lots of whys. During 2020, Bloomberg Philanthropies contributed $100 million to historically black medical schools in an effort to increase the number of black doctors nationwide. Bloomberg has a lot going on:
Bloomberg Philanthropies 2025 global impact. Image from Bloomberg Philanthropies Facebook page.
Our Guide
More than 1250 cultural organizations use the Bloomberg Connects app to feature and highlight their holdings. That’s 250 more institutions than when we started last fall. There were only two organizations in Minneapolis using the app back then, MIA and Walker Arts, and now us too. We built the app over a number of months and to be honest, the process was a lot more labor intensive than I expected. I thought it would be more like a wiki or sorts, in which you upload images, add text, and voila…there’s your guide. But no. There was a whole cohort of museum and cultural institution professionals that thought the same as I and we had our eyes opened very quickly to the fact that this would be a time consumer. There were lots of meetings and webinars and general check-ins, not to mention emails back and forth. Oh the emails! But it was comforting to know that Bloomberg Connects had a standard and that they had a full understanding of what it would take to get the organizations involved to meet or exceed that standard.
We’re freshly launched and looking forward to all the future additions to exhibits and programs to come. Right now you can see current exhibits, listen to the archivist (yours truly) and curator, Alyssa Thiede talk about items in the collection that aren’t on display. You’ll get a lovely welcome message from our executive director, John Crippen, and you can hear Rosella DiPietro, our communications manager, give insights on the Christian Mansion. And of course we have a place to show off our oral histories. We hope you find the experience insightful, resourceful, useful, and all the “fuls”. You can download the app via QR code or go straight to our guide from your computer.
-Michele Pollard | Hennepin History Museum Archivist