What will museum of the future look like? There are some amazing new technologies which can help to bring the museum experience to the modern user, and especially to the youth who mostly expect everything to be digital. In this series of articles I will highlight some of these new and emerging ideas and technologies which are being developed. In this first articles I show how Virtual Reality is being used interactively to provide access to the oral history of Holocaust survivors.
Free Mini Web Pages for Museums – 2016
We are renewing our offer to museums for us to provide a Mini Web Page which is localised to your town or city, and which is then discoverable by tourists and others.
This is part of a larger initiative to create a general cultural atlas of the country, similar to what has been done in other countries of the world, to enable easy access to a host of arts, culture and heritage activities. This initiative is partly driven by some of the international papers delivered at the SACO conference in Port Elizabeth.
Our first part of this initiative is to build up a comprehensive atlas of all of the museums, with each having their own Mini Web Page.
For the Mini Web Page we offer the following:
- we gather information from you about your museum
- we will build a Mini Web Page using a standardised design, incorporating your own information and images
- we will then publish this on the XtownX portal under your specific museum name with an address such as : xtownx.co.za/YOURMUSEUMNAME
Please download the following form in Word, complete this, and then submit this as indicated, and we will then keep you informed about the progress.
XtownX-084-MiniWebPages-MuseumRequest-V001-20160607
We look forward to hearing from you, from the ETHER team.
Building Great Museum Websites / 2
The first article in this series introduced the issues with museum web sites, including those issues common to all historical sites and memory institutions. In this second article I focus on some of the content required and how this content can be adapted to meet the needs of the different types of users.
Building Great Museum Websites / 1
We conducted an analysis of museum web sites almost ten years ago, with the purpose of understanding how good are local museum web sites compared to the best in the world, and we repeated this study four years ago. We have recently commenced a new such survey of South African museum web sites to understand how best practice is evolving, and how we can better advise museums on how they can use the web are a core medium of communication.
This is the first in a series of articles which address how you can build a great web site for your own museum.
[Read more…]
Bletchley Park – From Old to New
I have always considered Alan Turing to be my personal hero, the one historical figure whom I can look up to and acknowledge. Alan who? you say!
His life story has been the subject of a recent movie, The Imitation Game, which made it to the final few movies for the Best Picture at the Oscars. It did not win, but just getting to this point is significant.
So let me tell you a little about the man…
Alan Turing was the inventor of the first stored-program computer, and in doing so is seen as the father of computing, the father of computer programming, and also the father of artificial intelligence, and yet he had to keep all of this secret during his life because of the official secrets requirements during WWII, and much of this was only opened to the public a relatively few years ago.