New Ways To Search, Navigate And Use Multimedia Museum Collections over the Web

Paul Lewis, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Kirk Martinez, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
James Stevenson, Victoria & Albert Museum, United Kingdom
Matthew Addis, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Fabrizio Giorgini, Giunti Interactive Labs, Italy

Session: Finding Stuff

Museums and galleries are becoming increasing rich in digital information. This is often created for internal activities such as cataloguing, curation, conservation and restoration, but also has many additional uses including gallery terminals, Web access, educational, scientific, and commercial licensing. New forms of multimedia content such as 3D models and virtual spaces have huge potential for enhancing the way people interact with museum collections; for example, in structured eLearning environments. Despite drivers for increased integration of information sources within the museum or gallery, and for improved Web accessibility for external users, this content is often hard to access and is held in multiple internal systems with non-standard schemas and descriptions. Providing information to external users or applications in a structured and machine-readable form is particularly difficult due to a lack of tools and standards. This makes it difficult to expose this rich source of information so it can be used over the Web in external applications. Over the past three years, the European Commission IST supported SCULPTEUR project has been addressing these problems by developing new ways to create, search, navigate, access, share, repurpose and use multimedia content over the Web for professional users. This paper describes the tools and techniques developed in the project.