Virtual Museums Workshop | Session 8
A virtual museum can provide a framework for organising digital content and for putting on exhibits and exhibitions. Done right it should help connect communities with their heritage and provide a platform for projecting that heritage to wider communities and audiences. It should provide resources which empower volunteers and professionals to create digital exhibits and exhibitions.
Part 1: Putting It Together in a Virtual Museum
In this session we will see how to create a virtual museum for an organisation, site or topic. The virtual museum will bring together exhibits and exhibitions with an archive. It will help connect with through social media.
We will look at the sorts of heritage and types of media that a virtual museum needs to work with. We will also outline how meta data can be used to add value to digital media whilst minimising the work required to do this.
Part 2: Virtual Museums in an Age of Pandemics, Climate Change and Conflict.
This panel discussion will focus on the challenges for and potential of virtual museums for promoting and preserving heritage in the volatile times that we find ourselves in. We will bring together museologists from Latin America, Scotland and the Caribbean to discuss the role that virtual museums can play in the future.
About Digital Heritage Workshops: Bringing Museums to the Home
In response to the impact of Covid-19, *CUPIDO European Interreg cultural heritage project has collaborated with XpoNorth Heritage to hold a programme of eight online digital skills workshops aimed at the Heritage sector and facilitated by Dr Alan Miller and Catherine Anne Cassidy, from the Open Virtual Worlds Group at the University of St Andrews. The workshops are designed to help heritage organisations develop the skills to connect with existing and potential new audiences through digital media, covering topics such as digitising collections, photogrammetry, working with phones and commodity cameras to create 360 degree images and videos.
The impact of COVID-19 on the heritage sector has been huge with museums and visitor centres closed and potential visitors confined to their homes. At the same time there has been a flourishing of online heritage interactions, often through social media and accessible via devices available in the home.
This series of workshops aims to facilitate the sharing of skills and resources, whilst helping to equip heritage professional and volunteers in working with heritage online.
About CUPIDO
CUPIDO (Culture power: to inspire development in rural areas) Interreg North Sea Region cultural project is a cultural heritage project. Its overarching aim is about developing new business opportunities in the cultural and cultural heritage sector. This is to reinforce the economic position, competitiveness and social inclusion of local rural communities. CUPIDO is cultural activities such as art, dance, music and cultural heritage. The project has 16 partners from 7 countries and runs from 2019 to 2021.
Through CUPIDO, Highlands and Islands Enterprise has partnered with University of St Andrews to work with communities and social enterprises across the region on a programme of transnational digital activities designed to help commercialise the culture sector. More information about the CUPIDO project can be found here https://northsearegion.eu/cupi... and www.cupidoeu.org
Inspired by the #museumathome, #cultureathome and #heritageathome this series of workshops will help and support heritage volunteers, professionals and organisations connect audiences with both cultural and natural heritage.
A Facebook group called “Heritage Studio” will provide access to resources, opportunity for discussion and links to recording of past workshops. Feel free to join the group at:
www.facebook.com/groups/herita...
The CUPIDO archive and virtual museum system will provide a place to put things you create in the workshops and help connect it with the workshop activities.
The Open Virtual Worlds group is an interdisciplinary group based in the Interaction Lab, School of Computer Science in St Andrews University. Over the years they have collaborated with the Timespan Museum and Archive in many projects and are pleased Timespan will be contributing their expertise to these workshops. The workshops will also feature work from across the Highlands and Islands including the Tahai Chearsabhagh Museum, Highlanders Museum, Shetland Museum and North isles Landscape Partnership.
