While often one goes to a museum in order to see visual artifacts, be they paintings, a shovel from the fifth century, or the inside of a space engine, it is important to remember that "meaning is constructed and interpreted in relation to text-based resources: meanings do not arise from thin-air; they are textual products" (Ravelli, 150). In museums, these "resources" include, but are not limi...

We are delighted to host the international workshop Re-Thinking Technology in Museums, made possible by the generous support of Convivio, the EU-sponsored Network for People-Centred Interactive Design. Over the past few years work at the Interaction Design Centre has dealt with a number of issues regarding the complex relationship between museums and galleries and interactive technologies. Wher...

Department of Anthropology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208277, New Haven, CT 06520, USA (EJS) Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208106, New Haven, CT 06520, USA (EJS, ATR) Division of Vertebrate Zoology, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, CT 06520, USA (EJS, ATR) United States Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, National M...

Hello class, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a sudden shortage of sculptures and needs several new ones to fill its shelves. Please break into groups so that each group can build a Lego tower. The director of the museum will be here in an hour to pick up the towers and put them in the museum with your names on them. Please do the best job you can; you don’t want to be professionally embarras...

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, KU Biodiversity Institute, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA, Biology Department, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Museum of Natural Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, School of Life Sciences and Technology, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Java, Indonesia, National Museum of the Philippines, Manila, Philipp...

This paper discusses the design issues of playful interaction within a museum through the study of a museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We provide an overview of our case study, summary of our user evaluation, and discuss our use of ecological approaches from the domains of acoustics, ethnography and information technology in order...

KEVIN DE QUEIROZ1,∗ AND MICHAEL J. DONOGHUE2 1Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560-0162, USA; and 2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8106, USA; ∗Correspondence to be sent to: Division of Amphibians and Reptiles, National Museum o...

The newly expanded Acworth Leprosy Museum at Wadala, Mumbai which was opened by the Municipal Commissioner, Dr. Jairaj Phatak, on 9th June 2009, is not just about a disease. It holds a mirror to Indian society through the ages, by depicting how it dealt with a dreaded, misunderstood as highly infectious, and apparently incurable deforming disease (Figure 1). The ‘Homeless Leper Asylum’ (today b...

This paper discusses the development of a virtual reality museum. An effort was made so that the virtual museum represents the Byzantine, medieval museum in Rhodes as closely as possible. Simple and low cost tools were used to allow rapid development of relatively good quality applications. This was attempted to validate our belief that the construction of VR applications is within the abilitie...

The Silver Dart Project is the first on-line multimedia encyclopedia in a Canadian museum and one of the first such applications in any museum. This award-winning multimedia database encompasses information on the 118 aircraft in the Museum's collection, including text, images, video and audio files.It is the result of a unique partnership between the Museum, cultural sector organizations and p...