Mike Cherney

What is your job title at the museum and what does the job entail?

Well, my official title is exhibit preparator. There are three of us; the other two are John Klausmeyer and Dan Erickson. My job is to develop and maintain the exhibits in the museum. I do a bit of everything, but I guess my specialty would be in label design and text, as well as the interactive exhibits like the large computer screen in the rotunda. My most recent job is adding an interactive screen to the mastodon exhibit.

What kind of design software do you use in creating the material shown on the interactive displays?

I mainly use Macromedia Director. For images I use Photoshop, and for video editing—well, first we have a guy on North Campus take the videos—but for editing purposes I use Final Cut Pro.

What kind of career path led you to become a museum preparator?

Originally I wanted to major in computer science, but I decided I didn't want to be stuck behind a desk doing meaningless programming work, so I changed my major to anthropology. I picked anthropology because it seemed like an interesting field, and while I was a student here at the University of Michigan I started working at the museum for independent study and thought, "maybe I want to work in a museum." I started off doing fossil preparation in the paleontology museum and now I have an 80% appointment as a full time museum preparator.

What's been the most interesting exhibit you've worked on thus far?

Definitely the mastodon exhibit. Dan Fisher, a professor at the University of Michigan and "mastodon authority," wanted to make full sets of molds for the two mastodons we had gotten a hold of, the Hyde Park and Buesching mastodons, and since I knew how to do casts and molds I basically supervised and trained the UROP students who were helping with the work. Eventually we decided to display the Buesching mastodon molds over the Hyde Park ones, and so I helped out Dan Erickson in terms of having the casts mounted.

I know you're planning on adding interactive screens to the mastodon exhibit. Are there any other exhibits the museum is looking to add those to, and what's the driving force behind the movement to touch screen displays?

Well right now you can see we already have a big interactive display in the rotunda area. The professors seem to really like them and in fact they've on occasion offered to buy the units for their exhibits. Personally, I think we have to keep their usage limited. They should basically act as labels instead of replacing the exhibits in their entirety. For instance, Dan Fisher wanted to have a label description on one of his exhibits that was 3,000 words long, but usually with labels we’re limited to about 100 to 150 words. Now with these displays, we can just have a two-minute video of him talking, which would get people's attention more so than would a really long paragraph of text. I think also, the fact that we can show videos, more images, animation and sound really make the experience more entertaining and simpler to understand, so there doesn't have to be a series of cryptic arrows and diagrams like in some of the label work. But again, I think [interactive screen] usage should be limited in that they act as labels, and not, say, websites, or something along those lines.