Tag Archives: dMuseion

5th Digital Encounters with Cultural Heritage

This year the conference was related to the topic of “Digital Representation of the Artefact – methods, reliability, sustainability.”. The conference took place in Wrocław (19-20 Nov 2012). During the conference multiple interesting presentations were performed, including those related to digital preservation, visualization and access to cultural heritage digital assets over the internet. Several standards and formats were presented (e.g. STARC metadata schema for cultural heritage documentation), 3D visualization approaches proposed, and finally cataloging techniques described supplemented with best practices. Conference attendees had also opportunity to learn about multiple tools developed by Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center for the cultural heritage institutions, including dMuseion system for building digital museums, dLab system to manage digitization workflow, as well as dArceo focused on long term preservation of cultural heritage digital assets.

QR Codes in the Rabbit House

Since 22 October in the Xawery Dunikowski Sculpture Museum w Królikarna (The Rabbit House) – a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw (MNW) you can see an exhibition titled „KoLekcja w Królikarni” (Collesson in the Rabbit House). On the Królikarnia website you can find that, this exposition is “thought to be an announcement of the new image of the permanent galleries in the main building of the MNW” and that “it prepares the visitors to see familiar works, but presented in a new concept – not in chronological and geographical order, but according to types and functions of paintings”.

This exhibition is also the first one in the history of the MNW, where the information plates located near the paintings contain specially encoded links to more detailed information about these paintings available in the Digital National Museum in Warsaw. To achieve this in the Digital National Museum a series of themed collections was created representing particular parts of the exhibition:

In these collections you will find descriptions and digital images of exhibits, which can be seen in the Rabbit House. With the use of functionality provided by dMuseion, a system developed by PSNC, creators of the exhibition were able prepare QR codes containing links to exhibits’ descriptions available on-line. Then these codes were placed on the exhibits’ information plates in the MNW branch.

Visitors of the exhibition, looking at the exhibits, with thier mobile phones equipped in a camera, a general QR code software Internet access, are able to get additional information about exhibits. This information is made available via dMuseion system with websites optimized for viewing on mobile devices.

Digital National Museum in Warsaw is on-line!

On the 12 May in the National Museum in Warsaw a press conference took place. On this conference the Digital National Museum in Warsaw was oficially presented for the first time. This digital muzeum is available at http://cyfrowe.mnw.art.pl/ and it is based on the dMuseion software developed by PSNC. During the conference Ms Lidia Karecka, vice-director of the museum, described the history of digitisation efforts and electronic inventory in the museum. PSNC representative shortly described the role of Digital National Museum in the context of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation and Europeana. PSNC is the main technical partner in this enterprise and it is responsible for the software platform. During the conference representatives of two companies (NIKON and Scanning 3D) also spoke. Both these companies supported the digitisation of the museum collections. Objects digitsed by scanning 3D can be found in a special collection of the digital museum. The last element of the conference was on-line presentation of the portal functionality performed by dr Piotr Kopszak, coordinator of digitisation in the museum.

The conference attracted media and the information about the portal launch were soon published in many information portals including, m.in. TVP (National Television), PAP (Polish Press Agency), Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta.pl.

Collections of the Digital National Museum in Warsaw are already available in Europeana. The data transfer is realized in cooperation with Digital Libraries Federation under the EuropeanaLocal project.

Conference “Cyfrowe spotkania z zabytkami 4”

This year’s edition of the “Cyfrowe spotkania z zabytkami 4” conference was organised with subtitle “Cultural Heritage on the Web: Access and Exchange of Information.”. The conference brought together representatives of various institutions including libraries, museums, archives, humanists and computer science specialists. Conference covered topics related to the standards for information representation (such as CIDOC CRM and LIDO), methods of knowledge acquisition from unconventional sources (e.g. blogs) and also standards for describing iconographic resources. In the context of cartography, a system for geographical localisation of cultural heritage digital resources was presented.

During the conference Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center presented dMuseion – digital museum platform, which is developed by PSNC in cooperation with National Museum in Warsaw. Despite dMuseion is not publicly available yet, it already offers functionality for building digital collections of museum holdings.