When you think of all the immigrant groups that have made America great, the Swiss typically don’t come to mind. So I was curious to see “Small Number: Big Impact: Swiss Immigration to the United States,” on view at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. The exhibition design had less of the cool austerity of the Swiss modernists Herzog and de Meuron, or the stateliness of Mario Botta (my favorite contemporary Swiss architect), and more of the slapdash of the Dutchman Rem Koolhaas. In six intercommunicating rooms are, on one’s right, glass display cases with sections each devoted to a different Swiss immigrant who had a “big impact”on life in America.In the bottom parts of the cases are pull-out metal drawers that contain mini-displays on more Swiss immigrants or progeny thereof.On the tops of the cases are video projectors throwing images and video vignettes presumably having to do with the figures described. (I say presumably because I am incapable of focusing on video displays in museums.)

The mode of presentation is unusual and not unarresting.What jars, rather, is the no doubt purposeful (though for what I cannot say) quotidian and sometimes shoddy nature of the display items. For example, the drawer having to do with the Guggenheims — arguably the most influential of all Swiss families in America — features a bit of text next to three postcards and a tiny model of the Guggenheim Museum, as if that were that family’s principal contribution to American life.

Another problem is the show’s subtitle: “Swiss Immigration.” While the show in fact tells us next to nothing about Swiss immigration as a social phenomenon, it does tell us about the lives of certain Swiss immigrants or their progeny, as in the case of the pop singer known as Jewel. I can’t say I left the exhibit not knowing more than when I entered, for I had not known Jewel was Swiss. I knew, somehow, that she was from Alaska. In fact, she grew up in a hippie atmosphere in which her parents forswore electricity and running water, while her Swiss grandfather, Yule Kilcher, taught her how to yodel. She made her first run at stardom by yodeling on “Good Morning Alaska,” then became a rapper named “Swiss Miss.” Who knew?

We learn the stories of Adolph Rickenbacher,”father of the electric guitar,” of race car driver and automotive entrepreneur Louis Chevrolet, of Treasury Secretary and New York University founder Albert Gallatin, of “On Death and Dying” author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and a few others who get the main space in the glass cases. The Guggenheims I’ve already noted are consigned to a drawer, as is the nominally Swiss physicist Albert Einstein, the important photographer Robert Frank, and Microsoft co-founder Steve Ballmer and actress Renée Zellweger — whose fathers all came from Switzerland. Besides the Guggenheims, the most interesting of the figures is the great engineer Othmar H.Ammann (also consigned to a drawer) who gave New York the Verrazano, George Washington, Triborough, and Bronx-Whitestone bridges, as well as several other masterpieces of modern bridge design.

What strand runs through these lives we don’t learn. Clearly, these names do indicate that the Swiss have had an impact in America. “The Encyclopedia of New York City,” which has entries on most of our immigrant groups, including the Guyanese and the Estonians, neglects to mention the Swiss. An exhibit like the one at Ellis Island, especially given its tantalizing title, could and should have filled a void of knowledge, but it chooses merely to tantalize. Still, the information I gleaned about Jewel has made me very curious about the heretofore (so far as I know!) unexamined musicological connection between yodeling and rapping.

Until October 31 (Ellis Island, 212-363-3206).