Digital Exhibitions
Digital exhibitions offer a great opportunity to GLAM institutions to put a selection of digitized cultural objects in the spotlight and create manifold narratives around them. The combination of different types of media objects, such as images, texts, video and sound files as well as the possibility to make accessible cultural content from memory institutions from all over the world to virtual visitors are just two advantages digital exhibitions have.
In order to monitor, analyze, and discuss the developments on the field of digital exhibition creation an open, international Digital Exhibitions Working Group with partners from Poland, Italy, Sweden, Romania, Greece, Israel, Hungary, Belgium, and Germany formed in 2011. The founding group affiliated with the European Linked Heritage project and now cooperating with consortium members of the AthenaPlus project, contributes to the work on digital exhibitions advanced by the AthenaPlus project (e.g. development of the open-source tool MOVIO).
Website of the Digital Exhibitions Working Group
The working group presents its research work, findings, and outputs on a website with integrated resource databases for tools, literature, guidelines, and trainings related to the topic of digital exhibition creation and maintenance. This offer will be augmented by a database that will feature a compilation of digital exhibitions available online or on other offline storage media.
Resources databases of the Digital Exhibitions Working Group
A recent publication of the Digital Exhibitions Working Group is a checklist presenting relevant points to deal with when realizing a digital exhibition. The checklist “Things to consider before creating a digital exhibition” addresses possible questions that may arise in the process of planning and setting up a digital exhibition and points out to problems and time consuming pitfalls.
Checklist “Things to consider before creating a digital exhibition” (PDF, 176 kb)
This checklist (version 1.0 - 10/06/2015) consists of guiding questions for planning and realising digital exhibitions. The guiding questions may correspond to phases of your project. These five phases – concept, resources planning, outreach and evaluation phase – aremarked as headings in order to help to structure the work process. Each of the guiding questions contains a key word that is written in italics and for each question some explanatory statements are provided. Please note: Neither do all questions and statements necessarily apply to your project, nor does their order evoke a step-by-step hierarchy – rather they are intended to serve as aidememoires.
Poster “Things to consider before creating a digital exhibition”
To improve the current descriptive practice through standardization and to facilitate the discovery of the digital exhibitions through search engines, cultural portals or other services the Digital Exhibitions Working Group suggests a structured metadata format for the description of digital exhibitions. The Digital Exhibition Metadata Element Set (DEMES) has been made available in the form of an AthenaPlus best-practice brochure and proposes a simple format using selected elements that are widely used in the descriptive practice (e.g. cataloguing) of cultural heritage organizations.
Booklet Digital Exhibition Metadata Element Set (DEMES)
A set of 30 descriptive elements specific to digital exhibitions, grouped into seven semantic sections based on existing standards.the seven sections, including the elements, are packaged together in a wrapper called Digital Exhibition Metadata Elements Set (DEMES).
