Abstract
Emergent digital media such as digitized objects, immersive tours and virtual environments are more accessible to museums and cultural institutions. They open up exciting possibilities for engagement with natural and cultural heritage to audiences within the museum and online. As part of the CINE European project, we have developed an infrastructure that simplifies the creation of virtual museums with the capacity to create, collect, archive, curate, and disseminate. The infrastructure is open source and built around the Omeka framework with connections to social archive sites, such as Sketchfab and Roundme, through their APIs. Users register, associate themselves with an organisation, and upload content such as photospheres, 3D objects, and aerial photography. Metadata associates with locations, dates and organisations, which generates interactive maps, timelines and semantic searches. Users can customise outputs, such as the maps and timelines, which can be shared or embedded into personal websites or social media pages. As well as external outputs, the system can be used to develop internal outputs by reusing uploaded content. For example, virtual tours originally created for a museum exhibit can be curated into a mobile application using the infrastructure’s exhibition building interfaces. As well as the presentation of content, the infrastructure aims to provide support in the virtual world for the range of activities associated with museums in the real world. It contains toolkits which provide support for 3D digitization methods, virtual tour creation, digital intellectual property management and virtual reality exhibits.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Museums, audio visual and digital media in a world of changing communication |
| Subtitle of host publication | A collection of AVICOM papers at the 25th ICOM Conference Kyoto |
| Publisher | AVICOM |
| Publication status | Published - 2019 |