The Virtual Museum is a local project that builds upon the ACT Cinemage series of products and makes use of the Rnet high speed network. The project will bring together several local museums in a consortium application. In addition to the UBC Museum of Anthropology, who are already involved with the CHIN project, participants will include the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Vancouver Museum and the Simon Fraser University Archeology Museum. Funding has been requested from the Vancouver Foundation for digitizing images and for operating costs. There are a number of inter-related aspects to the project.
The key component for the project is a server that will be operated by ACT. This server will be capable of making available both image and multimedia data across the network. Primary image data will be on CDs stored in a CD jukebox.
Participating museums will be able to build up their image collections during the term of the project. Museums can have existing transparencies scanned onto Photo CDs by local processing labs, and the CDs physically installed in the ACT server. Alternatively, member museums could acquire a direct capture workstation in which images are "photographed" directly as digital representations, and written onto CD. Also, other materials such as photographs can be digitized on members' scanners and written onto CDs using the ACT drive.
Management Participating museums will be able to integrate their image collections with their catalogue data maintained by the Canadian Heritage Information Network in Ottawa, to create a distributed yet integrated national image bank.
Museums can prepare presentations based on their collections of images. Programs are available that support extensive screen layout and content branching capabilities, as well as the extensive use of audio in addition to image and text data. Some limited use of video vignettes may also be possible.
ACT will develop a Kiosk Client program that will permit member museums to locate kiosks on their premises that allow patrons to access image as well as authored multimedia data.
The ACT server will have a back end connection to the Internet, so that museums can provide some content that can be accessed through the curator client as well as home pages on the World Wide Web. The museums can decide just what information they wish to make available in this manner.
It is anticipated that this project will establish connections to the Virtual Museums International project, described in the following article.