NODEM 2014 Proceedings

Innovative Museum Exhibits: Telling a Story by Means of an Engaging Experience
ICOM indicates (“Museums of the world 2012” report by De Gruyter Saur) the total number of museums in the
world to be 55,000, which means a spectacular quantitative development of the museum sector.
Besides this, looking at the number of museums that have undergone substantial renovation of buildings and
equipment, through processes that have made them virtually ‘new’, we realise that they have enjoyed nearly
50 years of uninterrupted growth; making the museum sector one of the most dynamic “cultural industries” in
Europe – in spite of the static image conveyed by the media.
This renewal process also involved the testing of new “languages” ​for communication and enjoyment. This evolution
has been strongly influenced by the digital revolution that, with the advent of the Internet, has involved
all aspects of modern society, including museums.
The first application of ICT technologies was focused on the “digital” conservation of museum collections. One
of the first recorded definitions of “Virtual Museum” is dated January 1997, written by Jamie McKenzie and
published in the Technology & Learning Magazine:
“A virtual museum is a collection of electronic artifacts and information resources – virtually anything which can be
digitalized. The collection may include paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, recordings, video segments, newspaper
articles, transcripts of interviews, numerical databases and a host of other items which may be saved on the
virtual museum’s file server. It may also offer pointers to great resources around the world relevant to the museum’s
main focus.”
With the development of technology the “virtual dimension” has grown, offering spaces and experiences that
go beyond architectural spaces and beyond museum collection limits. In Report 1 – The Virtual Museum of The
Learning Museum Network Project, prof. Massimo Negri identifies some of the functions that a virtual museum
can specifically fulfil:
• On-line exhibitions
• Active role of users in building their own collections
• Visual archives of past temporary exhibitions
• Experiencing the museum “behind the scenes” (storages, restoration workshops, etc.) via a webcam, etc.
• Exhibitions of objects destined to disappear in a short time and digitally recorded for ‘eternity’
• RSS: following history in the making
• Objects on-show coming from any possible point of the world at the same time
• The possibility to compare digital objects of the most divers physical natures
• Enrichment of the user experience: closer access to masterpieces…but at a distance (Google Art), augmented
reality, 3D modelling….
Focusing on the last point, we can identify – in recent decades – an important shift from the idea of a collection-oriented
museum to that of a visitor-oriented one, and in recent years another shift to a user-oriented
one, in which the relationship between the museum and individuals (who, in the near future, will all be “digitally
native”) goes well beyond the specific moment when he/she visits the exhibition.
Museum objects are no longer the central element: the communication aspect is becoming prevalent. New
communication tools, such as social networks, have expanded in an incredible way, and many of the “users”
are also users of museums. As a measure of this phenomenon, a significant example is given by the New York
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA): in the year 2013 it was visited by 8 million people, but it can consider 92 million
“virtual visits” on its Facebook profile.
NODEM 2014 Conference & Expo
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