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 en...

This chapter presents an architecture for supporting the creation of adaptive virtual reality museums on the web. It argues whether the task of developing adaptive virtual reality museums is a complex one, presenting key challenges, and should thus be facilitated by means of a supporting architecture and relevant tools. The proposed architecture is flexible enough to cater for a variety of user...

The slogan of the efforts towards automating the collection information in Norwegian museums in the seventies, was Get a bucket under the data stream formulated by Jostein Hauge, then the director of Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities ( Hereafter NCCH). In Cooperation with the national organization of the art and social history museum, NCCH developed a standard registration form (on ...

Natural History Museums (NHMs) are a rich source of knowledge about Earth’s biodiversity and natural history. However, an impressive abundance of high quality scientific content available in NHMs around Europe remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers, such as: the lack of interconnection and interoperability between the management systems used by museums, the lack of centralized ...

This paper is concerned with the application of context -aware computing to museums and art galleries. The paper reports three studies addressing this issue. The first study involved a survey of visitors to an art gallery and focused on visitor activity and information requirements. This led to the conclusion that one could define visitor types and relate these to the amount, and level of detai...

There is a growing interest in museums and galleries to deploy novel technologies, such as computer exhibits, information kiosks and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in their exhibitions. Museum managers and designers hope these technologies can help to facilitate new forms of participation and interactivity and enhance people’s understanding of exhibitions. This paper puts the impact of soci...