Toward an integrated digital museum system – the Chi Nan experiences

The essential activities of a museum are multifaceted and include collection, preservation, research, exhibition, education, and entertainment. Hence, the march toward a full-fledged digital museum must evolve from the digital library concept with the addition of various interactive edutainment modules. In this paper, we describe various phases of the digital museum systems constructed by the National Chi Nan University, Taiwan, over the past few years. The design concepts and integration issues of essential digital museum modules are addressed. We have as our long-term goal the construction of an integrated digital museum that provides digital archives with user-friendly information access interfaces, intriguing virtual exhibitions, adaptive online courseware, and adaptive interactive games. A mechanism to facilitate the implementation of large-scale aesthetic exhibitions has been proposed. Our approach, the fine-grained modularization of aesthetic hypermedia presentations, concerns the balance between the complexity in the authoring process, the aesthetic qualities of final hypermedia presentations, and efforts at style template implementation. Moreover, various experiences and evaluations of content-based image retrieval, online courseware, and online interactive games will also be addressed. Future work toward an integrated digital museum system is proposed. Our digital museums can be accessed at http://dlm.ncnu.edu.tw.