5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

Stage 2 of the English National Curriculum) in order to be used in conjunction
with a booked museum visit. Finally the ‘DIY’ option offers resources for
teachers who wish to put together their own teaching material using the Petrie
museum’s material. 184
Related to the idea of providing digital content for specific target groups is the
idea to allow users a more personalized online experience. For instance, the
Petrie Museum’s website offers a feature which allows users to personalize
content and to involve audiences’ voices within the museum. Their site has a
section called ‘Personal Highlights’ where any user can save and then put on
display a selection of works from the database and comment on it.
This feature allows people not only to juxtapose works according to their view,
or to redefine the meaning of the object selected, but also allows them to voice
their opinion. Similar to this is the Virtual Museum of Canada’s (VMC) ‘My
personal museum’. Users can search the collection, save objects and write texts
next to them. Features of this kind were often related to an empowerment of the
visitor, who becomes a curator. These kinds of features were also associated with
the notion of the visitor-driven museum as opposed to the curator-driven
museum.
The VMC and Petri Museum’s examples are quite old in relation to the fast
moving IT world. Tools which support the personalization of Web content have
moved on quite a bit since then. However, it is important to keep these sorts of
examples in mind so as to illustrate more clearly where issues around
personalization originated and to make it clearer how they have moved on since.
As observed by Parry and Arbach, “a paradigm of increased personalization,
localization and constructivism characterised by a greater awareness of and
responsiveness to the experiences, preferences and context of the distance
184 Petrie Museum http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk/index2.html (as of 2.5.2005).
101