CMU History Goes Mobile

By Brad King

In October, Carnegie Mellon marked its 125th anniversary by launching a partnership with Bloomberg Connects that helps our storytellers reach audiences beyond the campus.

The partnership addresses a long-standing challenge for the Carnegie Mellon University Archives. For the last few years, Julia Corrin, associate dean for Distinctive Collections and Michael and Lonna Smith University Archivist, and the Archives have been documenting Carnegie Mellon's history in the Hunt Library Gallery, a space endowed by Michael and Lonna Smith to ensure that current students and alumni can connect with the university's legacy and traditions. But exhibits are, by nature, temporary. They take months of research, digitization, writing, and design. Then, after a short time, the exhibit closes. The stories come down. Work begins on the next project. Bloomberg Connects, a free mobile app from Bloomberg Philanthropies, allows universities and museums to create interactive walking tours and exhibits on mobile devices.

"We want to make sure that the stories in our exhibits—for scholars, for alumni, and for the general public—are available in the future," said Corrin. "They can't just be ephemera."

Connecting with Bloomberg

Carnegie Mellon's work with Bloomberg Connects began a year ago, with Meagen Fekos, senior director of Advancement Communications and Marketing, and her team seeking ways the university could celebrate CMU125 with a community that is spread around the globe.

"We wanted to bring together the main campus, our locations around the world, and our community around the world," Fekos explained. "We kept asking: how can we really allow people to travel through time and space to bring them to CMU?"

Her team explored various apps, but continually returned to Bloomberg Connects. CMU applied to the philanthropy program and was selected as one of the participants in the university cohort. Once that happened, the work of building began, which demanded months of work and coordination.

Bloomberg Connects requires that each experience have thoughtful digital storytelling components that create a compelling experience on a mobile device. That means it's more than just a PDF upload, said Jonathan Munar, head of Community and Partner Success at Bloomberg Connects.

Fekos led the effort, which connected the broader Advancement Communications and Marketing team with content creators across campus and colleges to develop a comprehensive digital experience that included accessible written, visual, and audio content—that can be translated around the globe thanks to integrated Google Translate.

"I am genuinely so grateful to our CMU colleagues and partners who generously provided content, were part of testing, are promoting the app, or are simply just users enjoying the experience," Fekos said. "This wouldn't have come to life without so many people contributing their time, energy, and enthusiasm."

She also said that this initiative was made possible thanks to a partnership with Executive Director Joyce DeFrancesco and her team, as well as the support from Associate Vice President Cindy Crimmins.

"The collaboration we prioritize in Advancement allows us to innovate and take on big ideas. And that comes from leadership championing our work, and the people we work with on a daily basis being not just on board but excited for disruptions," Fekos said.

Just before Homecoming, her team launched five walking and virtual tours:

• That's So CMU explores university traditions, from Spring Carnival to Buggy races, giving alumni a way to share CMU culture with family or revisit their beloved rituals even when they aren’t on campus.
• CMU Beyond Oakland provides virtual access to satellite locations, including CMU Africa, highlighting the university's global presence.
• Public Art (East and West) guides users through campus sculptures and installations, revealing the stories behind the artwork that the campus community passes daily.
• Made Possible by Make Possible showcases the impact of the most successful campaign in university history.

Each tour runs under an hour, designed as "lunchtime experiences" for faculty, staff, students, and visitors to explore during breaks.

The Exhibit Experience

The sixth experience was an experimental collaboration with the Archives and its “Room to Imagine” exhibit celebrating the university's 125th anniversary.

The exhibit team—Corrin, Brad King, anniversary exhibits and publishing managing editor, and Heidi Wiren Kébé, associate director, creative—collaborated to create the physical installation in Hunt Library. Wiren Kébé designed the immersive space, and King translated that experience into a mobile format, utilizing the existing stories and visual assets.

As the exhibit team worked with Fekos, they began to see how this partnership might transform their storytelling. The Hunt Library Gallery can't accommodate oral histories, video interviews, or extensive audio content, but the app can. King is already planning to document future exhibits differently, photographing artifacts individually to create a mobile-first experience rather than just capturing crowded display cases.

The app also solves the "ephemera" problem. "Room to Imagine" will live on digitally even after the physical installation closes next summer. And the exhibit team can now reconstruct past exhibits—”Looking Back to Move Forward,” “Nuts, Bolts, & Wheels: 100 Years of Buggy”, and "Like, Totally Transformative: CMU in the 1980s"—giving them new life in mobile form.

"This becomes now an experience that remains when the physical exhibits go away," King said. "In that way, we can continue to build stories about the university and its history in a way that becomes a conversation with people anywhere in the world."

History Without Borders

Fekos envisions Carnegie Mellon's work with the app as a "living, breathing experience" that will continuously evolve. She hopes that other departments will create their own experiences, such as athletics tours, public art walks, and special content for family weekend visitors.

"If you can dream it and you're willing to invest and partner with us on it, we want to make it a reality," Fekos said.

For the Archives, this helps expand the original vision behind the Smith Gallery: connecting people to CMU's history wherever they are. The Archives produces one major exhibit annually in the Hunt Library, but also develops installations around campus, opening up possibilities to significantly expand its digital reach.

"Bloomberg Connects is a great way for us to connect our own community and to find new communities as well," Corrin said.