MOVIO: A Toolkit for Creating Curated Digital Exhibitions

AbstractIn 2011, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism (MiBACT) published a guideline reference book analysing the state of the art and best practices of digital exhibitions made available on-line and offered a handbook successfully translated in English and even in Arabic. To satisfy the needs expressed by museum curators (but not limiting to them) GruppoMeta has implemented the MOVIO platform under the coordination of ICCU: MOVIO is a semantic CMS which provides tools to support the development of virtual/digital exhibitions, touristic and didactic applications. MOVIO supports the creation of a media archive and ‘non-scaring’ ontology builder for a storytelling approach and it allows cultural content publishing (it includes the creation of visit paths, up to mapping, time-line, galleries and social tools). The MOVIO open source SCMS platform is an easy and ready to use toolkit to build online and mobile virtual/digital exhibitions and narrations. It has begun to be experimented by several Italian institutions and several European partners from the AthenaPlus consortium

Museo and Web: un kit pratico per le istituzioni culturali che vogliono realizzare un sito web di qualità

Museo and Web is a best practice, the result of shared results at a European level as part of the MINERVA project (http://www.minervaeurope.org/), which produced a series of very important guidelines in the field of the quality of cultural websites. One of these results was the creation of the open source CMS (Content Management System) Museo and Web, produced and funded by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, especially devoted to cultural institutions (museums, libraries, archives, etc.) that want to build a website. The importance of this CMS, characterised by modules especially planned for cultural institutions, is that it is not imposed by third parties, but is designed with the contributions of the cultural institutions which participate in the enrichment of the platform by expressing their needs. The diffusion of the kit (which also includes a series of guidelines on how to build the architecture of the websites of cultural institutions) contribute to increase awareness among the stakeholders of cultural institutions dealing with communication and web publishing on accessibility, usability and quality of cultural website in general. More than 150 Italian institutions have already built their websites with Museo and Web. A few hours of training are enough to learn how it runs and how to use it. In 2010, the source codes will be made available on the SourceForge platform, in order to share these results with a larger audience