ACT recently completed an agreement with the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). CHIN maintains a central database containing a catalogue of the artifact collections in Canadian museums. Currently the CHIN database system is a text-only system and is accessible via simple terminal-mode connections.
ACT is developing a multimedia museum archiving system in cooperation with CHIN. With this system, individual museums will maintain multimedia information on their collections on their own server machines at their own locations. The system will use the existing CHIN database for searching the collections to determine the locations of multimedia data of interest.
Clients will access the system through a program that runs under Windows on a PC that allows them to easily search the database and display available multimedia information.
We expect to have a prototype of the system by October, 1994.