Sustainable Online Technology for Museums of the Pacific Islands Region

Introduction

In July 2005 I presented a week long workshop on the use of technology for museums of the Pacific islands region. Here I report on the workshop, so later work which came from it and some ideas which might be used for sustainable online technology for museums of the region in the future. Listed documents provide the report of the workshop, the outline, and a travelogue.

Workshop

A report of the workshop is available. Select the "projection" option in your browser for the presentation version (not available in Internet Explorer). The emphasis of the workshop was on the skills needed for construction of a web site for each museum. However, broader use of the Internet was discussed, particularly the use of web search engines as a research tool and the effective use of e-mail for collaboration between museum staff.

Illustration 1: Fiji Arts Council Website

Semantic Web for Museums

Museum software design by Kwok Chung, 2005

One of the recommendations made following the workshop was to investigate building an on-line repository of materials from across the Pacific. In second semester 2005, Kwok Chung, a computer science student at ANU undertook a six month project to investigate how this could be done using the Semantic Web. A prototype was produced, which showed that further work on this approach would be worthwhile. The Semantic Web and a digital repository could provide museums a more flexible way to catalog their materials and share digital representations of it.

Advertising to Support Museums?

The workshop showed that Pacific museums have a craft aspect beyond that of museums in Australia. One aspect of this is to sell products, which could be done via e-commerce. In addition the museums have a role in promotion of tourism. A useful adjunct to this could be to sell advertising on the museum web site. It should also be kept in mind that the web is being made available on new devices, such as multimedia mobile phones, with multimedia. As an example see "India: the EU of Asia".