Animal Care Room at ECHO Lake Aquarium

I'm combing through some of my old photos of museum examples, and came across this space, which I remember loving.

The ECHO Lake Aquarium is in Burlington, Vermont, right along the beautiful Lake Champlain waterfront. It does a lot of things very right. It takes some interesting risks in its exhibition - I'm going to try to write about the exhibition critique we did a the NEMA fall conference last year - but it generally holds with an open, crowd-friendly approach.

The animal care room was a neat example of that. Like all aquariums, ECHO has a large animal population that it rotates on and off view. I thought their solution to rotating animals off view was particularly nice, as well as their labeling of that space. Here's what it looked like.

If you can't read the photo, it says: "Taking good care of our animals is our top priority! From touring schools, libraries, and summer camps, to serving as the star attractions in our exhibits, our 'animal ambassadors' are some of our hardest working employees. Inside the animal care room, our creatures take a much-deserved break and receive special care from our staff.