abouTculture

BUSH LIBRARY'S GRAND RE-OPENING
By REBECCA WATTS

“This is an exhibit where we want people to touch stuff. Take the phototo off the shelf, push the buttons.”
- Warren Finch, director of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museumm

Christmas arrived in November for William Maple, senior designer for the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum re-design and renovation. Watching visitors explore the newly added interactive exhibits, he likened the experience to unwrapping a gift.

“It’s a joy. It’s like we’ve wrapped up a Christmas present and went and bought just the right wrapping paper and are watching them open it,” he said. “It’s been a real labor of love. A lot of hard work. A lot of sweat and tears, a lot of long days and nights.”

Universal Exhibits, a California based company that conducted the original construction of the Library in 1997, headed the project. It took the company six months to construct the new exhibits, but it was a two-year project for Maple, one that included relocating from California to Bryan with his family. Maple said when he first walked through the museum he felt like he’d read President Bush’s resume but never met the man. He hoped to help people feel as though they had met Bush after visiting the museum by incorporating technology in the design.

Maple and his team of designers dug through 43 million pages of documents, one million photos, thousands of audio and video recordings, and 90,000 artifacts in addition to collections still held by the Bush family. After the re-opening ceremony on November 10, Maple said he was pleased with the outcome. “I’m pleased that George is pleased,” he said. “We really wanted to capture his heartbeat.”

Former President Bush requested the latest state-of-the-art technology be included in the renovations. The museum has upgraded from 10 interactive displays to 90. They’ve installed television screens, directional sound, push-button consoles, and a tent theatre. New exhibits including the White House Pressroom, the Situation Room, and the Oval Office are exact replicas with only minor size modifications. There is even a replica of a CIA satellite to show how the technology works.

Antenna Audio, a global leader in multimedia tours, installed audio exhibits. Visitors can pay extra upon admission for a hand-held device featuring the voices of President Bush, Barbara Bush or their daughter Doro Bush Koch explaining various exhibits. Touch-screen interfaces that display images, videos, and captions as well as audio are available for hearing-impaired visitors, and audio descriptive tours are available for visitors that are blind or partially blind.

Visitors are encouraged to pick up and touch everything in the museum. Warren Finch, director of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, said “This is an exhibit where we want people to touch stuff. Take the photo off the shelf, push the buttons.”

Barbara Bush donated 113 scrapbooks to the museum that chronicle the Bush family as early as the former president’s college baseball years at Andover and Yale Universities. There is a special donation from President Bush of a picture of His wife he kept in his wallet. In the family tradition exhibit, Maple and his team added 900 photographs and 1300 labels highlighting the childhood of both the President and Mrs. Bush.

Adding so many photos to the Library created problems the design team solved with technology. “It’s a tough thing because conservation is an issue, how much light can we put on it. So we’ve put motion sensors in the lights so that they’re not on when no one’s in the room,” Maple said.

Interactive displays in the newly added Situation Room look much like desk-mounted phones. Visitors can learn about the decisions that led to the Persian Gulf War by acting as commander-in-chief and pick and compare their decisions to President Bush’s.

The addition of the Oval office also offers visitors a chance to sit in the seat of power – literally. “We say anyone can become the President in the United States and we want [visitors] to feel like they are,” Finch said. Visitors touring the library and museum can sit behind the desk and have a picture taken by a digital camera installed in the opposite wall. The picture is relayed to the front desk where it can be picked up on the way out for a fee.

The exhibit is an exact replica of the original and even former President Bush said he couldn’t tell the difference. “They tell me it’s a little smaller than the original,” he said. “I told Barbara the other day sometimes I find it hard to believe I was actually President of the United States of America. I’m getting a little long in years and maybe it’s the shifting, fading memories, but I do. I honestly do. And I still have the same sense of awe about the Oval Office as the first day I saw it.”

President Bush is pleased with the way the library renovations turned out. He chose College Station for his presidential library, he said, because “It has to do with one thing – the Aggie Spirit.”

The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum makes a great contribution to tourism in the Brazos Valley. Patty Sears of the Bryan-College Station Convention and Visitor’s Bureau said she is hoping it contributes to more growth next year.
“The remodel should really boost a lot of interest. We did a lot of marketing going into the re-opening. Everyone that I’ve talked to, that’s been out there, has been excited about it and love the fact that it’s so interactive,” Sears said.

Since October of 2006, Ms. Sears has booked 35 overnight group tours and a little over 100 day trip tours, which included about 1600 visitors. She said a day visitor in College Station spends approximately $90 visiting various Brazos Valley attractions.

Brian Blake, public relations director for the Library, hopes the re-design brings visitor levels up in the coming year. “Right now we’re in the 100 to 150,000 range. We hope to see that jump by about 20 percent,” he said. The current visitor levels rank the library among the top five of those operated by the National Archives.

The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum is a part of the George Bush Presidential Library Center which includes the George Bush School of Government and the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation, which provided funding for the renovations.