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

Other digitisation projects of museums:
Website Project / Museum Country
www.mediathek.at Austrian Mediathek
(Technisches Museum)
Austria
www.cornucopia.org.uk Cornucopia UK
www.digital-heritage.at Digital Heritage in Austria Austria
www.culture.gouv.fr La Joconde (Musée des France
France)
www.nationalgallery.org.uk National Inventory of
European Painting 1200 –
1900 (National Gallery
London)
The websites reviewed in the following were selected on the basis that altogether
they should represent anything from large public institutions to small private or
local authority museums in Austria, Germany and the UK. The body of websites
should include those which show a long history of an engagment in digital
technologies as well as those who have only got involved in this area more
recently. The websites reviewed are largely art museums, however, if a point can
only be made through looking at a different type of museum then that should not
be excluded. The Making the modern world website is a good example for that. It
is not an art museum, but it exemplifies best the idea of the story-driven museum
website. That’s why it was selected as an example, even though the focus of this
study is art museums.
Through answering the question of this chapter, the research aims to contribute
to the debate about the purpose, meaning and significance of online museums. It
is particularly interested in raising the question whether an engaging and
accessible experience of museums is related to the quantity of digital objects
presented online. It seems obvious that if a museum does not have much online
content, it cannot offer very much to its audience; but what if one has rich digital
content collections? Does this ensure an engaging and accessible experience of
culture? Through answering these questions, this chapter aims to develop the first
key idea that sit at the very basis of this thesis, namely that making culture
accessible through online media is not so much a question of quantity but one of
the quality of content and communication styles.
UK
42