Writing Postcards from the Museum: Composing Personalised Tangible Souvenirs

Building a long-lasting personal relationship with visitors by maintaining their engagement after the visit is one of the most challenging endeavours cultural heritage sites face. When successful, this connection fosters new opportunities for the visitor to get in touch with the heritage, e.g. to visit again or to take part in cultural activities. One way to establish a personal connection is via personalisation services that generate souvenirs for the visitors to take away and foster future engagements with the heritage. This paper discusses how the techniques for personalised text generation can be applied to produce post-visit postcards exploiting the interaction logs collected during the museum visit. The personalised postcard summarises the visit, creates a link with what was experienced and suggests further paths for content discovery. A user study conducted over four weeks confirms the appreciation for the personalised postcard and suggests future developments

FROM A RESEARCH PROTOTYPE TO A DEPLOYED SYSTEM: THE CASE OF THE HECHT MUSEUM VISITOR\u27S GUIDE

Cultural heritage, Deployment, Mobile guides, Research prototype

Observing presenters’ use of visual aids to inform the design of classroom presentation software

Large classrooms have traditionally provided multiple blackboards on which an entire lecture could be visible. In recent decades, classrooms were augmented with a data projector and screen, allowing computer-generated slides to replace hand-written blackboard presentations and overhead transparencies as the medium of choice. Many lecture halls and conference rooms will soon be equipped with multiple projectors that provide large, high-resolution displays of comparable size to an old fashioned array of blackboards. The predominant presentation software, however, is still designed for a single medium-resolution projector. With the ultimate goal of designing rich presentation tools that take full advantage of increased screen resolution and real estate, we conducted an observational study to examine current practice with both traditional whiteboards and blackboards, and computer-generated slides. We identify several categories of observed usage, and highlight differences between traditional media and computer slides. We then present design guidelines for presentation software that capture the advantages of the old and the new and describe a working prototype based on those guidelines that more fully utilizes the capabilities of multiple displays

An Integrative Framework for Extending the Boundaries of the Museum Visit Experience: Linking the Pre, During and Post Visit Phases

The Cultural Heritage experience at the museum begins before the actual on-site visit and continues with memories and reflections after the visit. In considering the potential of novel information and communication technology to enhance the entire visit experience, one scenario envisioned is extending the on-site visit boundaries, to help the visitors access information concerning exhibits that are of primary interest to them during pre-visit planning, provide relevant information to the visitors during the visit, and follow up with post visit memories and reflections. All this can be done by using today’s state of the art mobile and web-based applications, as well as any new foreseeable emerging technology. So far, research on applying novel information and communication technology in the cultural heritage domain has focused primarily on exploring specific aspects of the technology and its capability for supporting the individual visitor mainly during the physical, on-site, visit (and in some cases in additional specific phases such as prior or after the visit). This paper suggests a novel, integrative framework for supporting the pre, during and post visit phases in a personalized manner. It is based on a set of standard, common models: a visitor model, a site model and a visit model, all enable a large variety of services to store, update and reuse data during the three phases of the visit. Our contribution is presenting a framework architecture with its underlying infrastructure, and showing in a case study how this framework supports the various visit phases in an actual museum. The suggested framework is generic; it is not limited to a specific setting or scenario and it is open and can be easily adopted and used by practitioners and researchers to be implemented in different sites and settings. As such, it provides a further step in extending the cultural heritage experience beyond the on-site visit and towards linking individual episodes into complete, memorable personal experiences