The Challenges of Digital Museum

Introduction

From time immemorial, traditional museum exhibits have always been limited to leading the audience into showrooms to view the physical collections. However, due to the limitations of factors such as exhibition space, venues, and schedules, the total numbers of direct contacts with exhibits is in the minority. For instance, the National Palace Museum (NPM) of Taiwan, which contains more than 650,000 domestic and foreign antiquities, has continuously increased its collections by purchasing or accepting donations of artefacts. The entire collections would take over 30 years to exhibit if each exposition is run for three months at a time (Chou, 2010). In this situation, a museum would seem like an antiquity warehouse, where is inapproachable and distant. Moreover, since antiquities belong to all citizens, the traditional museum has a predicament which owners cannot freely acquire information about their properties. According to the statutes of International Council of Museum (ICOM) (2007):

Hence, an important role of a museum is to make its heritages become a part of our life, much like the functions of a library. Based on this aspiration, the digital curation of a museum has become a common pursue in both the academic and public sectors.

In this chapter, we focus on the aspect of user experience and describe strategies that help to enhance a visitor’s on-site experience in a museum through digital technology. We discuss the development of digital curation in cultural expression applications, such as museums and art galleries, focusing on the user experience perspective, and illustrate how the use of technology can increase the communication and interaction between viewers and collections in museums and art galleries. We point out the gaps of current development, and discuss direction for further research.