The Virtual Museum is a project involving ACT, the Vancouver Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the UBC Museum of Anthropology. The project recently received a grant of $40,000 from the Vancouver Foundation to assist in the development of an on-line virtual museum. The museum will make use of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) database in Ottawa, linking images from the museums with textual information in the CHIN database. The images will be stored in a Photo CD jukebox located at ACT and will be accessed through the CINEMAGE software developed by ACT.
Museums are currently digitizing images from their collections and expect to have a collection of some 2,500 images on CD by mid-February. ACT has just taken delivery of a Photo CD jukebox capable of storing and retrieving 150 CD's. The virtual museum will be connected to the Internet via a T1 link. Initial access to the material will require an account with CHIN.