Creating A Virtual Museum Exhibit

What are digital exhibitions?

Many libraries and museums accept taken their special collections such as rare books, manuscripts, photographs, pamphlets, news clippings, musical scores and more and have digitized them to create collections of digital assets that tin can be displayed online through a digital exhibition. Digital exhibits such as these offer unprecedented access to organizational treasures that might never be seen otherwise except by those with local physical admission to the museum or library. A new brood of open-source and free software tools has recently emerged making it possible to catalog and manage digital collections and create robust narratives and layouts for display online.

Major Software Tools

These are the primary software applications which are used past libraries and museums to create digital exhibits and for digital asset management. The industry leader in this space is a proprietary application called Contentdm (http://www.contentdm.org/) created past OCLC. Contenddm is a digital collection management software that allows for the upload, description, direction and admission of digital collections. This application offers robust cataloging features and an like shooting fish in a barrel-to-use interface simply is price-prohibitive for many non-profit organizations. Entry level CONTENTdm options starting time at $4,300 annually with mid-size Licenses that offset at a $10,000 quondam fee with ongoing almanac maintenance starting at $2,000.

contentdm

A Contentdm Digital Collection

Complimentary and Open Source Tools

Even so, there are many free and open up source alternatives to Contentdm for creating online interactive digital exhibits.

Omeka
http://omeka.org/
Omeka is a gratuitous, open source web publishing system for online digital athenaeum. Its main focus/strength is producing websites and online exhibitions. Both the Web interface and dorsum cease cataloging organisation are one unified application. Users tin can build attractive websites and exhibits using templates and page layouts, without having to accommodate lawmaking, although more robust displays tin be created past customizing the CSS and HTML files, and moving around some PHP snippets. Omeka has a plugin available for OAI support to make collections harvestable by major search engines. Although Omeka is a bit more limited than some other applications such as Collective Admission (see below) in terms of cataloging & metadata capabilities, it allows fast/easy creation of online exhibits through a Spider web interface, a depression learning curve, many plugins with added functionality, and a large developer customs.

Metadata Supported: Omeka uses Dublin Core and MODS metadata, and offers customizable particular type cataloging. In that location are many templates and plugins which offering added functionality such every bit displaying items on Google Maps, providing LCSH for cataloging

Hosted Version and/or Downloadable Code Available? Omeka offers both a hosted, Web-based version or the downloadable application which can be installed and hosted on-site by the organization.

Recommended for: Libraries, Museums

Collective Access
http://collectiveaccess.org/
Collective Access is a gratis, open source cataloging tool and web-based application for museums, archives and digital collections. Its main focus/strength is on cataloging and metadata. You can create very robust cataloging records, create relationships between items, create profiles of creators and subjects of items and link them to objects, etc. Commonage Access offers multiple metadata schemas. The Web component, called Pawtucket, is a divide installation, and necessitates editing php files in order to build/adjust websites. A forepart-end PHP developer would be necessary with this solution, and quite possibly one to set up the back-end templates as well.

Hosted Version and/or Downloadable Code Available? The application is downloadable and must exist hosted by the organization, no hosted version is available.

Metadata Supported: DublinCore, VRA, CDWA/CCO, MARC (planned), others, plus the power to create in house standards and to customize existing standards. Ability to access external data sources and services such equally LCSH, Getty Fine art & Architecture Thesaurus, and GoogleMaps, GoogleEarth or GeoNames for geospatial cataloguing.

Recommended for: Libraries, Museums

CollectionSpace
http://www.collectionspace.org/
ColectionSpace is a gratuitous, open up-source collections management application for museums, libraries, historical societies, and other organizations with special collections. The application is administered past Museum of the Moving Epitome, but it'south a joint partners with the division of Information Services and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley and the Heart for Applied Research in Educational Technologies at the Academy of Cambridge. The software is made upward of a suite of modules and services for managing your collections of digital avails, notwithstanding it doesn't have any native ability to create digital exhibits. Instead, information technology enables users to connect with other open up-source applications already in use past the cultural sector for online exhibition creation. The application allows for the creation of a customized controlled vocabulary for describing collections.

Hosted Version and/or Downloadable Code Available? The application is downloadable and must be hosted by the organization, no hosted version is bachelor.

Metadata Supported: CollectionSpace supports multiple metadata schemas including DublinCore and customized schemas.

Recommended for: Libraries, Museums

Open Exhibits
http://openexhibits.org/
Open Exhibits is a multitouch, multi-user tool kit that allows you to create custom interactive exhibits. The strength of this application has less to do with cataloging collections of digital assets, but developing online and interactive exhibits with digital objects. The multi-touch slice comes into play with the ability to specify that certain types of user behaviors will result in various outcomes, east.one thousand. if a user drags a certain section of an epitome, the entire image will move and readjust along with the movement. Users without technical expertise tin work with pre-existing templates and modules, while developers can create their own with the SDK kit. The application uses a combination of its own markup languages – Creative Mark-upwards Language (CML) and Gesture Marker-up Language (GML) along with CSS libraries.

Hosted Version and/or Downloadable Code Available? The application is downloadable and must be hosted by the arrangement, no hosted version is available.

Metadata Supported: Not applicable.

Recommended for: Museums

Pachyderm
http://pachyderm.nmc.org
Pachyderm is a free, open-source and easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool created by the New Media Consortium (NMC). It'due south been designed for people with niggling engineering or multimedia feel and involves niggling more than filling out a web form. Authors place their digital assets (images, audio clips, and short video segments) into pre-designed templates, which tin play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more than. Completed templates result in interactive, Flash-based presentations that tin can include images, sounds, video, and text that tin exist downloaded and displayed on websites or can exist kept on the Pachyderm server and linked straight from there.

Hosted Version and/or Downloadable Code Bachelor? The NMC has stated that they are no longer offering hosted accounts at this fourth dimension so the awarding must exist downloaded and hosted by the organization or private.

Metadata Supported: Not applicable.

Recommended for: Libraries, Museums, Educators, Individuals