>>
I wanted to enquire as to whether anyone on the group has had any=20
expereince with interactives which require visitors to input there email =
address=20
in order to receive a finished product?=20=20
 >>

I've been involved in several email systems in the Science Museum and 
other exhibitions. In general they work very well. Here are some top tips:

- There is always a chance of abuse but we've not really experienced 
it. To minimise the chances of abuse I would suggest the following.
1) Don't let people send "free" text or "free" drawing in such a way 
that they could write/draw something offensive. I did notice that 
when the V & A coat-of-arms system was first installed you could 
write a free text "motto" on the coat-of-arms. This feature was later 
removed, presumably due to abuse.
2) Make sure the emails have a "reply address" which goes back to 
someone in your organisation. That way if the system is being abused 
you can find out quickly and put the receiver on a "blacklist" so 
they don't receive any more emails
3) Make the system pause for a few seconds after sending each email. 
This makes it pretty tedious to try sending lots of emails to different people.

Other tips are more concerned with the technicalities

- You can send attachments to people but its a good idea to keep them 
small. Less than 100k is good rule of thumb as it means people on 
dialup can use it too. This should be enough for an okish sized photo.
- to make this work you'll need a network and a email server both of 
which can break. Every so often your exhibit should check if the 
email is working and if it isn't then don't offer the email option. 
This is much superior to offering the email option and then crashing 
because the network or sever is down.
- Solutions which put the image on a web site are much harder to 
build and maintain. If you put the images on a website you need to 
worry about the database filling up, people who can't find their 
image, people who want their image removed and whether people will 
find the website. In my experience relying on visitors to visit a 
website post visit results in <15% of them actually doing that unless 
you send them an email with the address.
- If you have more than one exhibit which does this you're bound to 
worry about whether visitors will get fed up with typing in their 
email address. You're likely to consider a complex system to get 
round this. In general visitors don't find this  a problem. Unless 
you have a huge number or exhibits or your visitors visit many times 
they would much rather enter their email address 3 or 4 times than 
understand some complex system which is supposed to make this quicker for them.

As I said before, in general,  email systems work pretty well so all 
the best with yours

Joe





Joe Cutting
Computer exhibits and installations
www.joecutting.com
35 Hospital Fields Road, York, YO10 4DZ
01904 624681

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