Museums

Museums are charged with the custodianship of local, regional, national and international collections. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) [202] defines a museum as:

“a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment”

According to Burcaw [63], museums exhibit and collect objects of artistic, historical, educational and aesthetic values. The main characteristic of a museum is that it is bound by presenting physical objects to visitors in a physical space. Museums are by nature, information providers interpreting the history and culture of artefacts and collections to their visitors [58].

Historically speaking, one of the prominent examples of the ancient world museums was the museum of Alexandria in Egypt called the“Mouseion of Alexandria” founded in the third century AD. It had a collection of statuettes of thinkers, astronomical and medical instruments and botanical and zoological specimen. Access to the museum was limited to only the intellectuals and philosophers of that time.

During the middle ages, objects of religious significance were venerated and kept in churches, cathedrals, monasteries and royal palaces [14, 23]. These did not constitute museums in the modern sense of the term.

The switch to the modern form of public museums happened gradually over a long period of time. Private collections previously owned by the nobility, the royalty and the religious institutions of Europe began to be put gradually on display to the public. Museums became public in the late seventeenth century with the appearance of the first university museum in Oxford in 1671. The Vatican established several museums around the 1750s across Europe. The British Museum was founded in 1753 when the parliament purchased the natural science collection of Sir Hans Sloane and thus made the collection public. Another example can be given is that of the Palace of the Louvre designated as the museum of the republic in France in 1793. A big number of museums across Europe and the Americas started to emerge afterwards (Charleston Museum - 1773, Smithsonian - 1846, American Museum of natural history - 1870 among many others) [14].

The role of museums is to collect and preserve material of cultural and religious importance and to present it to the public. The aim is usually educational and recreational. Museums tell the story of man, that of nature and that of the cultural identity of a nation. They assist future generations to understand the history and culture of their forebearers [23].

Many researchers [255, 370] linked the role of museums to that of mass media by drawing the analogy of them being tools for informing, educating, entertaining and storytelling visitors thus making what is“unfamiliar and inaccessible” into “familiar and accessible”. However, museums differ from mass media like newspapers, books,

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radio and television in the fact that they are bound to physical space whilst still providing the ability for their visitors to wander and interact with their exhibits. The behaviour of visitors in museums is also similar to that of consuming mass media in the sense of the“active dozing” behaviour of cultural heritage artefacts. Visitors normally spent more time in front of the objects that they have a-priori knowledge or a-priori interest in and less time on other objects. This leads to a less valuable experience. There is not much learning in what the visitor already knows. Visitors experience could be easily enhanced by providing edutainment approaches. The need for a remunerative, efficient and attractive use of information and entertainment in museums, leads to the use of Information Technologies as a way to allow museums to compete with other leisure pursuits and mass media [356]. Storytelling in museums is taking a new dimension catalysed by the need of museums to make their cultural products more appealing to visitors. Therefore, museums can act as a “primus inter pares” meaning“first among equals” [308]. This means that another defining role of museums is to establish a direct, fruitful, even personal communication channel between, the museum as a communicator and the visitor as a receiver. These roles can be switched and the visitor can communicate his/her own experience and personal views with the museum. This becomes prominent with stories presented inside Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Web3D applications used in situ (i.e. inside the museum) or via the world wide web through the intermediary of Web-Based Virtual Museums.

The World Wide Web provides great opportunities to present and offer remote access to objects, collections and their corresponding information adding new enriching dimensions to traditional museums [212]. The web offers also a tacit advantage which is providing random access to heritage material at the ease of users. There is no“sequentiality” in the web the way physical museums often impose on their visitors through specific paths or exhibits. If a user is interested in a certain type of art or culture, she can directly access, engage and learn about specific artefacts and skim or ignore others.

The Web and other Information Technologies, such as serious games, mobile applications among others provide the new dimension of “Virtuality ” which supplement the physical nature of museums. The following section is an exposition of this dimension that took the form of what become known asVirtual Museums.