Software for a Touchscreen Kiosk for a Museum

[G8racingfool]

Okay so short story time first (you can skip this paragraph if you want). My little town has a history museum that recently has been kind of flailing haplessly and is it some dire need of help (the current "curator" was literally making paper snowflakes and other "art" out of 100 year old books, it'd gotten that bad). So, certain members of the community are coming forward to try and rectify this and putting forth an effort to try and turn this little museum into something that's actually worth traveling to and visiting. I've been tasked with helping get the technology side up-to-speed. I've now got them set up with a nice photo scanning/reproduction setup to deal with many of the photographs, newspaper articles, and film slides and get them digitized. We're working on getting Internet to the site (still a bit up-in-the-air as it's in the "who's gonna pay for it" stage) and now, I've been tasked with coming up with a solution for to get a bit more interactive with some of the content at the museum.

So one of the things I've been tasked with is coming up with an interactive display/kiosk that we can use to allow viewing of some of the scanned photos, videos, and presentations by patrons. Budget-wise, we've got about ~$3000 per system installed so it's not a lot of money, but I've got most of the hardware specc'd out for a nice little system, I just need to find some software that will allow for the creation/modification of the interface and menus and all of that. I've been searching around and have found a few but I thought I'd ask here as well and see if anyone here has dealt with something like this before and know of a software/solution that works well. I'm on a bit of a deadline as I need to get a quote ready to submit by Monday as this will be funded by a grant (I literally just got this task yesterday.... short notice ftw).

So, anybody have any suggestions? Budget for the software would be up to ~$1000, and we definitely don't want a SaaS solution.

 

[NJW]

Obligatory Raspberry Pi application suggestion.

For a community effort, what about getting a local school/college involved?

 

[acs]

I am also involved with a local heritage organisation. My solution was to produce a "Website" made up of static html pages and run on a linux kiosk using http://porteus-kiosk.org/. It can be locked down to stop the Windows warriors playing with it and it autostarts back to a lnding pages when restarted.

 

[G8racingfool]

I am also involved with a local heritage organisation. My solution was to produce a "Website" made up of static html pages and run on a linux kiosk using http://porteus-kiosk.org/. It can be locked down to stop the Windows warriors playing with it and it autostarts back to a lnding pages when restarted.

This is actually one of the ideas I was toying with. So much can be done nowdays with web pages and css/javascript that I could effectively code a "website" to do what I'm looking for and then just have it hosted locally on the same system. The only /downside/ to this would be having a user friendly back-end that would allow someone other than /me/ (ie: someone who can, at best, use MS Word) to edit the content.

Then again, may be able to work that into a tax write off if I just donate my time and maintain it myself (since this is a community project after all).

Have to think about that one some more.

 

[Mainstay]

It has a lot to do with their backend software and how they are storing their data.

Our Museum uses Past Perfect and it has a Kiosk module, or at least the option to display its content in a browser. Maybe that with a touchscreen AiO?

 

[Markverhyden]

Then again, may be able to work that into a tax write off if I just donate my time and maintain it myself (since this is a community project after all).

Consult a accountant/tax pro on this. Generally speaking one cannot write off your labor when doing work for a nonprofit. You can write off your incurred expenses, like mileage, etc.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p526.pdf

 

[trevm999]

This is actually one of the ideas I was toying with. So much can be done nowdays with web pages and css/javascript that I could effectively code a "website" to do what I'm looking for and then just have it hosted locally on the same system. The only /downside/ to this would be having a user friendly back-end that would allow someone other than /me/ (ie: someone who can, at best, use MS Word) to edit the content.

Then again, may be able to work that into a tax write off if I just donate my time and maintain it myself (since this is a community project after all).

Have to think about that one some more.

Hire someone to create it using a web framework like Django, which makes it easy for them to add tasks to the admin interface. And also easier to hire some else to fix it if they need to down the road.