Developing a Network of Cultural Heritage Objects Repositories for Educational Purposes

Natural history museums collect and provide access to digital representations of artifacts from their vast collections. The representations are used, among others, to facilitate their use in educational settings. For example, school teachers use them to prepare class visits to the museums. In the context of the European project Natural Europe, these repositories are to be bridged in order to enhance the usage experience in learning scenarios. Based on a thorough requirements engineering process, respective architectures are defined and services provided. In this paper, we discuss the outcomes of the requirements engineering process. While teachers appreciate the provision of fairly complex learning paths through museums, they also need direct access to the individual learning resources aka artifact representations. Finally, the technical architecture of the Natural Europe system is presented as a result of the requirements engineering process.