In 1957 came the first major Industrial and Technological Musuem at Calcutta. The National Council of Science Museums was set up by the government of Indian in 1978 and in the short span of 12 years they have established a chain of 14 science museums all over India, with many more under various stages of planning. These museums are at three levels National, Regional, and District. The National ...

The idea for this special issue arose at the Cultural Heritage Information Professionals (CHIPs) workshop in April 2008. Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Florida State University, and the Ringling Museum of Art, the workshop’s goals were to explore the ability of educators to meet the information needs of cultural heritage organizations, and to encourage a closer relat...

Sociologists that study organizations often analyze the museum from a cultural perspective that emphasizes the norms of the museum industry and the larger society. We review this literature and suggest that sociologists should take into account the technical demands of museums. Drawing on insights from social studies of technology, we argue that museums are better understood as organizations th...

This paper gives an overview on crowdsourcing and co-curation practices in virtual museums. Engaged nonprofessionals and specialists support curators in creating digital 2D or 3D exhibits, exhibitions and tour planning and in the enhancement of metadata using the Virtual Museum and Cultural Object Exchange Format (ViMCOX). ViMCOX is based on international Lightweight Information Describing Obje...

The tradition of heritage interpretation is moving away from purely conservational and educational goals to an entertainmentand experience-oriented interpretative provision. New technologies are gaining prominence in museums to enhance visitors’ mindfulness, subsequent learning outcomes and satisfaction. Extant research literature reflects technology-based heritage interpretation; however, such...

The paper investigates the use of mobile tools by museums in order to provide mobile access to their permanent collections and special exhibitions. In fact, it deals with the wider topic of how museums tackle the complex issue of communicating with their present and potential audience using modern (i.e., mobile in this case) technologies. The paper presents and discusses the results of a survey...

The Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) were started as a personal project in 1994, forming part of the Virtual Library distributed information repository initiated by the original inventors of the World Wide Web. The VLmp resource provides a leading directory of online museums and associated resources which has grown exponentially in size and use since its inception. In 1996 the directory was...

Linked Data has emerged as the preferred method for publishing and sharing cultural heritage data. One of the main challenges for museums is that the defacto standard ontology (CIDOC CRM) is complex and museums lack expertise in semantic web technologies. In this paper we describe the methodology and tools we used to create 5-star Linked Data for 14 American art museums with a team of 12 comput...

In this paper we describe a Semantic Grid application designed to enable museums and indigenous communities in distributed locations, to collaboratively discuss, describe, annotate and define the rights associated with objects in museums that originally belonged to or are of cultural or historical significance to indigenous groups. By extending and refining an existing application, Vannotea, we...

In today's history museums, the past is communicated through many other means than original artefacts. This interdisciplinary and theoretical article suggests a new approach to studying the use of audio-visual media, such as film, video and related media types, in a museum context. The centre of interest is how history and authenticity is mediated at history museums and how museum visitors perc...