Museums have always been, sometimes directly and often indirectly, a key resource of arts and cultural heritage information for the classroom educator. The Web now offers an ideal way of taking this resource beyond the traditional textbook or school visit. While museums around the globe are embracing the web and put virtual exhibitions, cultural databases and archives on-line, the educator (or ...

The digitisation of museum collections provides great opportunities for broad communication and access. However, currently the majority of online ‘virtual’ museums present information two-dimensionally. Three-dimensional data capture using laser scanning provides the potential to generate 3D virtual objects that can be used for a much greater interactive experience. This paper presents the resu...

In the past few years, museum visualization systems have become a hot topic that attracts many researchers’ interests. Several systems provide Web services for browsing museum collections through the Web. In this paper, we proposed an intelligent museum system for history museum artifacts, and described a study in which we enable access to China and Japan cultural heritage information from two ...

Museums want audiences to engage with their collections and ideas, but recognize that traditional methods of unidirectional on-line and in-gallery communications have limited access and dialog. Supporting social tagging of museum collections, and providing access based on the resulting folksonomy, opens museum collections to new interpretations that reflect visitors’ perspectives rather than in...

The relationship between museums and mass media as well as the possible impact of information technology on museums are described. The “virtual museum” is defined as a means to establish access, context, and outreach by using information technology. The Internet opens the “virtual museum” to an interactive dialog with virtual visitors and invites them to make a virtual museum experience that is...

Nowadays, it is widely observed a constantly growing number of online museums. At the same time, many studies argued that evaluation is the major tool in the effort of designing informative, effective and qualitative web sites. This paper introduces MUSEF (Museum’s Sites Evaluation Framework), a framework for evaluating museums’ sites from the users’ point of view, and applies it to evaluate 21...

Frames provide a visual link between artworks and their surround. We asked how image properties change as an observer zooms out from viewing a painting alone, to viewing the painting with its frame and, finally, the framed painting in its museum environment (museum scene). To address this question, we determined three higher-order image properties that are based on histograms of oriented lumina...

The main purpose of this study is to propose a visitor centric perspective that can support museums towards sustainability. The main premise of this study is due to a concept of economic and social sustainability of museums, defined as the possession of sufficient resources to maintain the existence of an organization, and achieve their goals in the future, ensuring a certain flow of visitors. ...

Defining a physical or virtual space as a museum, seems to have clear implications on visitors’ behaviour and particularly learning behaviour. Past research shows that it is essential to identify different museum types and consider their similarities, differences and special features in order to be able to make valid research hypotheses. However, visitors would not always define certain types o...