The development of an e-museum for contemporary arts

Abstract

Τhe increasing development of interactive techniques and new information technologies’ software and hardware and the decreasing of their costs have facilitated their use by a wide range of cultural institutions, such as museums. These new technologies also provided solutions for the lack of exhibition space, considerable exhibitions’ costs and the fragility of some artifacts whose possible damage museum curators want to prevent. The value of these new tools and formats have been recognized and fruitfully exploited by curators for visualizing the cultural context of museum exhibitions. In addition, museums changed their way of conveying information about their cultural artifacts to the wide public, through new communication methods, like virtual museums, which have made the content and context of the museum collections more accessible and attractive to the wide public. During the last decade various kinds of ‘virtual museums’ have been developed either in the museums’ environment, or over the World Wide Web. Α virtual museum can be a digital collection that is presented either over the WWW, or to an intranet or even to a CD-ROM and it can be an extension of a physical museum, or it can exist only in a digital form. Furthermore, the virtual museum can have various forms. It can be a 3D reconstruction of the physical museum, where, in the virtual rooms of the museum exhibition, the visitors can navigate and explore its collections. Alternatively, it can be a completely imaginary environment, in form of various rooms, where the cultural artifacts are placed. This study describes all aspects of the creation of an e-museum for contemporary arts. Emerging tools, technologies, 3D digitization processes of museum spaces as well as artifacts are presented, public acceptance polls are discussed and educational scenarios are exercised. All presentations concern the actual case of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Arts in Thessaloniki, Greece.