Alchemical Quest: A Rare Books Museum Interactive

This was my first museum interactive. I managed its development for The Alchemical Quest, a 2012 exhibition built around rare books from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in the Othmer Library of Chemical History.

The technical challenge was unusually ambitious for a first interactive: a six-month development window, an unfamiliar touch-projection platform that had never before been installed in a museum, and a deeply technical interpretive problem. The exhibition was asking visitors to understand alchemy not as occult spectacle but as serious early chemical practice—distillation, medicine, metallurgy and transmutation—through books that were fragile, visually dense, multilingual and full of allegorical imagery.

The challenge was not to digitize old pages for their own sake. It was to let visitors look closely enough to see how those pages carried scientific ideas while preserving the books themselves. The resulting system combined a book-shaped touch-projection interactive, animated interpretation, an online version of the experience, and a mobile tour that extended the exhibition beyond the case.

Project goals

• Reinforce the depth and complexity presented in the exhibition content
• Implicitly reiterate the exhibition narratives while allowing visitors to enjoy the imagery of the books through the interactive experience
• Provide visitors with alternate means of experiencing the books in the exhibition
• Foster curiosity and encourage deeper exploration of images and text
• Demonstrate an example of an alchemical process in its entirety
• Reflect the fantastical and practical balance found within the books

What the project revealed

The whitepaper makes clear that this was not simply a technology installation. Visitors had repeatedly asked the museum for more interactive experiences, and The Alchemical Quest became CHF’s first interactive built specifically around a temporary exhibition. Development began only six months before launch, after much of the physical exhibition had already been conceptualized.

That exposed an important difference between exhibition and software development: technology needed more lead time, tighter decisions and a clearer handoff structure. As manager of emerging media, I served as the single point of contact between CHF and Night Kitchen Interactive, while a smaller internal group refined content and experience decisions with the developers.

The hardware itself was a genuine experiment. CHF was the first museum—and only the third U.S. organization—to purchase the Monkeybook touch-projection system. A defect affecting calibration, touch sensitivity and performance in changing light was identified late; the replacement arrived with about a month of development remaining. The project opened on time, but with fewer features than planned and a projection-proportion glitch on launch night. The report’s practical lesson is still useful: emerging technology needs substantially more testing and contingency time than a conventional exhibit component.

Evidence of use

The project was formally evaluated in fall 2012 by a University of the Arts Museum Studies team using timing-and-tracking observations, interviews and surveys. Their report found that the digital flipbook had the highest drawing and holding power of any element in the museum. Visitors spent an average of 6 minutes 42 seconds with the flipbook, while the Alchemical Quest gallery as a whole averaged 7 minutes 52 seconds.

That matters because the project was not conceived simply as a novelty. Visitor feedback before development had repeatedly asked for more interactive experiences, and the evaluation suggests the resulting system actually held attention around material that was otherwise difficult to encounter closely.

Beyond the gallery: the TourSphere mobile tour

The physical Monkeybook was only one layer. By October 2012 CHF was also promoting an online version at chemheritage.org/visit/museum/exhibits/alchemical-quest/interactive.aspx and a TourSphere mobile experience at alchemicalquest.toursphere.com for phones and tablets. The December 2012 web page survives in the Internet Archive, although its Flash-based interactive no longer loads in a modern browser.

TourSphere was not simply a promotional companion to the exhibition. It was a second interpretive interface designed for visitors carrying their own devices. The tour combined written stories, collection images, video, an interactive exhibit map, a visitor survey and audio “Curatorial Notes” by rare-books curator Jim Voelkel. Those audio notes were especially important to the concept: they allowed the curator to speak more conversationally and add observations that did not fit comfortably into label copy—something closer to having a knowledgeable guide alongside the visitor than reproducing wall text on a smaller screen.

What the mobile tour interpreted

A surviving TourSphere working document preserves some of the actual interpretive material prepared for the mobile experience. It walked visitors through the exhibition’s argument that seventeenth-century alchemy was not simply an occult or solitary pursuit, but encompassed practical chemical activity. The mobile material addressed distillation and the production of alcohol and mineral acids; concentrated medicines and the introduction of inorganic substances into the pharmacopoeia; metallurgy and the economic scale of mining; Georg Agricola’s De re metallica; and theories of transmutation associated with texts attributed to Geber.

That matters because the mobile layer could do something different from the Monkeybook. The gallery interactive invited close visual exploration of rare books and their imagery. TourSphere could carry the visitor through the exhibition itself, linking objects, cases, curator commentary and supporting media into a sequence. The two experiences were related, but they were not redundant: one opened the books; the other helped connect those books to the intellectual story unfolding around the room.

The project also gave us an early model for something that became more important in later museum work: interpretive content should not be built for only one device. The same underlying knowledge was being translated across a dedicated gallery installation, the web and visitors’ own mobile devices. CHF soon began planning a larger TourSphere experience for the permanent museum, using this exhibition as an early proving ground.

In that sense, Alchemical Quest was not just my first museum interactive. It was also an early experiment in separating interpretation from a single piece of hardware and thinking about how one body of institutional knowledge could travel across multiple visitor contexts. A later 2013 proposal explored taking that logic further through a downloadable iPad application.

Surviving technical archive

The project archive preserves more than screenshots and reports. Surviving files include the MegaZine/MonkeyBook runtime and configuration environment—megazine.swf, preloader.swf, megazine.mz3, XML configuration files, plugins, image and audio assets, an Adobe AIR MonkeyBook installer, and an offline Flash export package. There are also later Xcode source files associated with an iOS adaptation.

I am treating these files as preservation evidence rather than claiming that the original experience is currently runnable. But their survival means the project is not represented only by documentation: substantial pieces of the technical system itself remain in the archive. The deeper preservation problem is that digital interpretation can survive as files while the ordinary technical environment needed to experience it disappears.

Project documentation

The report below documents the project team’s efforts to make these texts accessible and alive to visitors through the interactive experience.

View the Alchemical Quest case study on Scribd.

Explore other downloadable case studies on Voices of the Past.