This article introduces a special issue of Museum Anthropology devoted to innovative strategies for teaching with objects. Although a century ago anthropology, museums, and objects were intimately entwined, trends in many museology and anthropology courses have drifted toward focusing on ideas and people rather than objects. The contributors to this special issue have cultivated new pedagogical...

In this essay, the Slovenia Ethnographic Museum and Chinese Tuva Private Original Museum will be involved in the discussion. The firsthand materials collected in Slovenia and Chinese Tuva villages have laid the foundation for academic discussion. With the rapid development of sedentarization, hunting prohibitions and tourism in Tuva villages of China, cultural and social dilemmas as well as the...

In recent years, 3D and virtual reality have emerged as areas of extreme interest as methods for visualizing digital museum artefacts in context, and particularly over the Internet. The technology associated with these new visualization techniques has until now been very expensive. The advent of cheap computing and graphics cards coupled with increasing Internet ‘broadband’ access has made poss...

Acknowledgements "We would like to thank the members of the SHAPE project, the staff of the Museum of Science and Technology and the staff of the Centre for User-Oriented IT Design for providing valuable help and feedback. We would also like to thank the Museum of Science and Technology for hosting the Well of Inventions." Abstract This paper is concerned with how research on interaction princi...

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been funded to create a collection registry and item-level metadata repository for digital collections and content created under the auspices of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. The first stages of developing the collection registry are described: defining a collection; surveying curre...

1 Department of Biochemical Sciences, University of Rome“La Sapienza”, Rome 00185, Italy 2 Department of Chemistry, University of Kentucky, Lexington KY 40506-0055 3 Department of Chemistry, Section of Biochemistry, University of Catania, Catania, Italy 4 Center of Membrane Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0059, USA 5 Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, University of Kentucky, L...

As museum databases are computerised a rich and extensive resource that could be reused to create World-Wide-Web pages and Computer-Aided Learning materials is being created. This reuse can be facilitated using a complex set of views of museum data for many different contexts and applications. This paper presents MUSiCAL, a data model and methodology for the structuring and encoding of all type...

Currently, museums provide their visitors with interactive tour guide applications that can be installed in mobile devices and provide timely tailor-made multimedia information about exhibits on display. In this paper, we argue that mobile devices not only could provide help to visitors, but also to museum staff. Our goal is to integrate, within the same system, multimedia tour guides with the ...

Since it opened in April 2001, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum has hosted a variety of exhibits and educational events designed to promote the understanding of the Lone Star State's unique and complex history. The impressive four-story museum, located at the corner of Congress Avenue and Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard in Austin, includes 34,000 square feet of exhibit space, along...