The Digital Museum in the Life of the User

This panel will explore the fascinating issue of the “digital museum in the life of the user.” As online museums, digital museum collections, and enhanced gallery devices become more common, it is important that we improve our understanding of how museum visitors make use of digital museum resources, online and in house. This panel, therefore, will discuss approaches to and the need for a better understanding of the users and usage of digital museums

Museums and Digital Culture: New perspectives and research

This richly illustrated book offers new perspectives and research on how digital culture is transforming museums in the 21st century, as they strive to keep pace with emerging technologies driving cultural and social change, played out not only in today’s pervasive networked environment of the Internet and Web, but in everyday life, from home to work and on city streets. In a world where digital culture has redefined human information behavior as life in code and digits, increasingly it dominates human activity and communication. These developments have radically changed the expectations of the museum visitor, real and virtual, the work of museum professionals and, most prominently, the nature of museum exhibitions, while digital art and life in a digitally saturated world is changing our ways of seeing, doing, our senses and aesthetics. Overall, this book creates a new picture of the 21st-century museum field. As museums become shared spaces with their communities, local, national and global and move from collection-centered to user-/visitor-centered institutions, they are assuming new roles and responsibilities tied to new goals for engaging their audience, conveying meaning through collections, creating learning experiences and importantly, connecting to daily digital life and culture integral to the museum ecosystem. Our studies of recent exhibitions at museums leading change are used to exemplify new directions, while they point to a reimagined vision for museums of the future at the heart of which is the integration of digital culture and visitor experience and participation in real and virtual space

Introducing Vireo: an ETD Submittal and Management System for DSpace

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : DSpace User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-20 03:30 PM – 05:00 PMThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a consortium of public and private institutions from across the state of Texas; a major project in TDL is the development of a state-wide repository for managing the entire life-cycle of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The Texas ETD Repository is a large effort that span multiple independent initiatives, all of which interact to support the overall task of managing ETDs in Texas. This presentation will describe Vireo, the customized submission and workflow management application that TDL developed for DSpace, and it's role within the Texas ETD Repository. We will describe its current implementation as a Manakin aspect and theme, and discuss the future plans for the application, including its release to the repository community under an open source license.Institute for Museum and Library Sciences; Texas Digital Librar

Smart museum of everyday life history in Petrozavodsk State University: Software design and implementation of the semantic layer

Since 2016 a smart museum of everyday life history has been developed within the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. This R&D project aims at solutions to the two important problems for creating a digital service-oriented environment for museum visitors and personnel: 1) offering personal recommendations on the museum collection with the use of semantic ranking methods and in context of the user and exhibition, 2) collaborative addition of information sources and their semantic annotation within the museum collection. Such solutions form the semantic layer of smart museum environment. This paper introduces our a) system design models for agent- based programming of museum information services, b) ranking models for semantic data mining in historical and cultural heritage domain. Our software implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed models in respect to the user mobility, service personalization, and collaborative work opportunity

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Fragility

Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of the digital age. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility. At the same time, digital technologies rely on hardware that has short life expectancy. The radical obsolescence of this new digital register raises a number of important questions. How are we going to prevent the fragile memories of contemporary digital cultures from receding into oblivion? This essay answers this question by looking at one of the institutions in which the problems associated with digital fragility are most especially felt, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and by exploring the ontological displacements that digital objects are operating at the heart of the museum

'Breaking the glass': preserving social history in virtual environments

New media technologies play an important role in the evolution of our society. Traditional museums and heritage sites have evolved from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that focused mainly on the authority of the voice organising content, to the places that offer interactivity as a means to experience historical and cultural events of the past. They attempt to break down the division between visitors and historical artefacts, employing modern technologies that allow the audience to perceive a range of perspectives of the historical event. In this paper, we discuss virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling techniques as a research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. We present the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through

Promising Beginning? Evaluating Museum Mobile Phone Apps

Since 2009 museums have started introducing mobile apps in their range of interpretative media and visitor services. As mobile technology continues to develop and permeate all aspects of our life, and the capabilities of smart phones increase while they become more accessible and popular, new possibilities arise for cultural institutions to exploit these tools for communicating in new ways and promoting their exhibitions and programmes. The use of mobile apps opens up new channels of communication between the cultural institution and the user, which extent to his or her personal space and go beyond the boundaries of the museum’s walls. The paper presents a survey carried out of mobile apps designed by art or cultural historical museums and analyses the wider issues which are raised by the findings. It discusses, among others, the kind of use these apps were designed to fulfil (e.g. the majority are guided tours to the permanent collections or to temporary exhibitions), the layering of content,and the type of user interaction and involvement they support