The CC4 Museum of Welsh Cricket has won the highly prestigious Kieran Hegarty Award for Innovation at the Celtic Media Festival, held this year at St.Ives in Cornwall, with the Museum at the home of Glamorgan County Cricket Club, winning the category this evening at the Festival's Award Ceremony for the most innovative use of technology in engaging with visitors.
Thanks to generous financial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Museum at Glamorgan's headquarters, which opened in 2012, contains a series of interactive displays and exhibits, as well as a series of static displays which chart the long and proud heritage of cricket in Wales.
One of the most popular interactive displays is BATIO, developed with grant assistance from Visit Wales, which gives visitors a chance to face in a wii-based environment three legendary bowlers in the history of Welsh cricket in Robert Croft, Simon Jones and Don Shepherd.
A series of video loops have also been created, including a series of films charting aspects of the Club's history as well as a project called TaleEnders, developed in partnership with the University of South Wales, which captures the oral history of club cricket in Wales.
There are also a series of interactive educational packages in the Museum as part of the CricEd scheme. These dovetail with the primary and secondary curriculum in Wales and allow visiting groups to the SWALEC Stadium as well as pupils at their schools throughout Wales to engage in learning activities with a cricket-related theme.
Other displays embracing modern technology in the CC4 Museum of Welsh Cricket include an X-box game called Shwmae, which has been created in partnership with Southampton Solent University which gives a modern twist on the popular Howzat dice-based game, whilst a series of interactive terminals and touch screens have also been installed allowing visitors to browse through a large archive of digital images besides finding out information on the history of cricket in their home area in Wales.
We are overjoyed to have won this award, said Dr. Andrew Hignell, the Archivist of Glamorgan CCC who has overseen the creation of the Museum at the Club's headquarters. During the planning stages with the various grant-awarding bodies and other individuals, we specifically designed the displays and the layout of the Museum Centre to provide visitors, of all ages, with an informative and stimulating environment.
I'm very grateful to all of the people and organisations who have invested their time and money into this exciting project, and it is hugely satisfying that our use of innovative technology has been recognised in this way. I'm sure that visitors to the Museum during the course of the 2014, and in the years beyond, will continue to benefit from the interactive experience we have created.