V IRTUAL M USEUMS

V IRTUAL M USEUMS

A virtual museum allows users to use their PCs to walk through and explore digital representations of various artifacts in virtual 3-dimensional space on the Internet. The user can use a mouse or joystick to move around. The aim is to make the museum exhibits more accessible and visitor friendly. The index home page provides an introduction to the collection highlights. Visitors who need more detailed information can dig deeper by choosing the specifi c detailed items they wish to explore. Virtual museums contain interactive databases which have many collections focusing on different subjects such as art, science, history, zoology, music, archeology, and biology. Virtual museums provide a new way for people to access vast collections of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, architecture, photography, fi lm, and video without regard to distance or time. The Virtual Library of Museums (VLMP, 2005) includes a list of links to museum sites throughout the world. The site has links to more than 400 museums in North America alone.

For example, if you visit the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the index webpage provides you with an overview of works currently on display in the museum’s various galleries. When you select a specifi c collection, you can also choose the fl oor you want to visit. A fl oor plan is then provided for you to select the images you want to see. The site also offers you an online gift and bookshop, various educational resources, and a calendar of special exhibitions and other planned museum activities. For some of the collections, sound sam- ples are available in RealAudio, WAV, and AU formats. Other collections provide QuickTime clips of selected information.

The French Ministry of Culture has helped create a virtual museum that contains more than 130,000 paintings from the great art museums of France. The original project was started 25 years ago and was text based. In 1994, webpages were added to allow visitors to see the pictures and virtually navigate through the different collections. People are allowed to make digital or hard copies of the museum work to build their own private collections or use in the classroom but are prohibited to make or distribute them for profi t or commercial advantage. Visitors can view the museum collections in French or English. According to Mannoni (1997), in real life,

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legal limitations or poor physical condition of the paintings and sculptures would have made it impossible to put all the paintings in the same place.

The Boston Computer Museum allows you to walk through the museum in real time (O’Rourke, 1996). The index home page requires you to fi ll in a quick survey that establishes you as a visitor. This allows you to communicate with other visitors in the museum through the “Who is Out There” feature. You virtually talk with others and almost get a sense of being there. You can learn virtually how a desktop computer is put together or design your own robot. The ability to dance on the keyboard, dive into a microprocessor, or control a robot over the Net is the next best thing to being there (O’Rourke, 1996).

However, there are limitations. Current technology does not yet provide an complete aesthetic experience. The information provided about the collections may not be detailed enough for serious scholarly work. Scholars needing more detail will have to wait—only the layman benefi ts from the current technology. This means a lot of images need to be digitally scanned to meet scholars’ needs. Laws regarding intellectual property rights create further complications, and there are frequently bandwidth problems with large visual and audio fi les. This means that the true value for the museum materials is yet to be established.