This paper, based on doctoral research carried out from January 2003 through July 2005, addresses the interpretation and representation of non-Western religious material culture in Western museums and offers a comprehensive view of the way traditional religious Yorùbá objects are displayed in contemporary museums in Britain. Museum exhibitions can be conceived as a visual narrative, which absor...

A team of staff and students at the Portsmouth School of Art, Design and Media came together to research the potential for interactive multimedia in museum programs to contribute to community regeneration. The project was part of the exhibition Play Up Pompey! which celebrates the centenary year of Portsmouth Football Club. The School's contribution was The Team in the Stand, a visitor-authored...

The astrolabe, an analog computing device, used to be the iconic instrument of astronomers during the Middle Ages. It allowed a multitude of operations of practical astronomy which were otherwise cumbersome to perform in an epoch when mathematics had apparently almost been forgotten. Usually made from wood or sheet metal, a few hundred instruments, mostly from brass, survived until today and ar...

The 21st century will see the emergence of a universal knowledge base accessible to the information privileged of the first world. Its elements will include full text of the world's libraries, text and image of its contemporary broadcast media products and large quantities of text and image from its archives and museums. What is not now clear is how archives and museums can best respond to this...

The good news is that there are at least twice as many software packages available today than there were in 1988, when the first edition of the directory was published, and that the products are, on the whole, considerably improved. The bad news is that a substantial number of vendors, and even more software products, have disappeared. In some cases these vendors or products are confirmed dead,...

Museums often suffer from so‐called ‘hypercongestion’, wherein the number of visitors exceeds the capacity of the physical space of the museum. This can potentially be detrimental to the quality of visitors’ experiences, through disturbance by the behavior and presence of other visitors. Although this situation can be mitigated by managing visitors’ flow between spaces, a detailed analysis of v...

Tourism in the third millennium has become one of the most thriving economic activities around the world, and many developmental planners and policymakers refer to tourism as the main pillar for sustainable development. Tourism is considered as one of the most complicated occupations in numerous countries worldwide and as a multi-aspect activity possessing various positive effects and utilizati...