Old Bones, New Media: bringing the collections of the American Museum of Natural History to the iPhone

The AMNH Dinosaurs iPhone app was the #1 educational download on the iTunes store for months after its release. In this demo, representatives from both the American Museum of Natural History's digital team and its development partner, 33Delivered, will talk about how the app came into being, how it works both inside and out, and the ways in which it solves a unique challenge: how can a museum make use of the very latest technologies to get a unique twentieth-century collection in front of a twenty-first-century audience? The basic technological concept for the app came from the entertainment industry; in applying it to educational content, Dinosaurs ended up outstripping in popularity all previous applications of that concept. The elegant simplicity of the app itself—an image of T. rex built from a mosaic of hundreds of individual images of fossils, drawings, dioramas, and photographs of archaeological digs, each with accompanying textual information—is accessible to audiences of all ages. In addition, the platform is extensible, meaning that a release of the app is not static; new iterations allow for the publication of additional chapters. AMNH and 33Delivered will discuss the challenges encountered in this endeavor, the opportunity a freely downloadable app presents for communicating the mission and purpose of an educational institution to a global digital audience, and the possibilities of iPhone apps as educational tools in and of themselves.