Creating Virtual Exhibitions from an XML-Based Digital Archive

A virtual exhibition system was designed and implemented to interface with the National Archives of Singapore digital archive to support the creation of online virtual exhibitions. The XML-based digital archive provides different artifact types that form the contents in the exhibition through the reference and reuse model. Artifacts and exhibitions are endowed with rich metadata that include the Dublin Core elements to support enhanced search support for field and free text searches. An authoring tool using a grid-layout approach is used to define and layout the exhibition contents. XML’s Cascading Style Sheet and Extended Style Sheets are then selected and applied to the XML documents from the digital archive to yield the final exhibition in HTML format. By supporting the use of information layering in the descriptors of the artifacts and the application of different style sheets, it becomes possible to create multiple versions of the same exhibition that vary in content, layout and interface so that it can be used to meet the diverse information needs of a range of different user communities.