Technology gives new life to old exhibits

You go into a museum full of beautiful paintings. There are few people there. Footsteps and some murmuring barely break the solemn silence. You stumble on a nice portrait you have never seen before. It arouses your curiosity. There's the name of the artist, the title, and the date and maybe a few lines about the origins of the work of art but nothing else. You will have to remember this meagre information and try to find more information back home on internet.

This has been the experience so far of many a visitor to museums in Malta but this is bound to change. Thanks to the latest information and communication technology, visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta will be able to immerse themselves into a new experience. Looking at the painting will just be the first of a series of steps that will lead the visitor to truly appreciate the value of what's on exhibition.

Heritage Malta has chosen the Museum of Fine Arts to trial a new system called Smartmuseum, partly funded by the European Commissions' FP7 programme. The overall objective of the project is to develop ICT solutions for smartphones and PDAs that enhance on-site access to digital cultural heritage, by providing personalised visit recommendations and selecting information based on the visitor's interest profile, thus taking full advantage of the digitised cultural information available.

The Smartmuseum solution takes into account the user's personal interests and visit purposes. The valuable statistical information reflecting user interests is made available for participating museums.

The 600 or so collection objects at the Museum of Fine Arts have been digitised and catalogued. The system is being fine-tuned to allow videos, audio and pictures to be transferred faster from the main Smartmuseum system server to the PDA guide through a WiFi (wireless) system for a better visitor experience. The digital library hosting documents, pictures, audio and videos related to fine arts will eventually be made available online to Europeana EU cultural portal and on the Heritage Malta website.

"The need of such a project emerged in the light of the mission of Heritage Malta to improve accessibility to the National Collection, as stated in the Cultural Heritage Act," explained Noel Zammit, the project coordinator and manager ICT and documentation at Heritage Malta. "This project increases access to information about our cultural heritage by providing an online catalogue of fine arts."

Thanks to this project, Heritage Malta was able to purchase and help develop a customised cataloguing system code named MUSES that has allowed it to catalogue its artifacts at the Fine Arts Museum according to international standards known as the Categories for Descriptions of Works of Art. These standards describe the content of art databases by articulating a conceptual framework for describing and accessing information about works of art, architecture, other material culture, groups and collections of works, and related images.

The technical merits of this project and databases are being undertaken by Projects in Motion Ltd and Seasus Ltd following a public call.

"Having information about the National Museum of Fine Arts collection captured in a digital library is a direct benefit to Malta's heritage," explained Mr Zammit. "Such a digital library allows conservation and restoration interventions to be captured in a database, hence 10 or 20 years down the line when another intervention is required on the artefact, the person in charge of conservation can be equipped with previous intervention information, which is crucial in the conservation decision-making process.

"Another important benefit is that information about fine arts collections is now available to researchers, students and the general public. Heritage Malta sub-contracted a heritage researcher to study the collections at Fine Arts museum. The information researched and generated was captured into this digital library."

Visitors will be given the opportunity to browse this information (text, images, videos and audio) using PDAs provided by the museum. This system enhances the visitor's experience through information dissemination by PDA and also allows the visitor to interact with the artifacts by expressing his/her views on the exhibits.

Visitors can create personal accounts on the system and indicate their personal interests for the visit. The system automatically learns about the users preferences during the visit, and makes relevant content recommendations to improve the experience.

The project posed its own series of challenges, but these were overcome through the effort of both the academic and the technical members of the team.

"Many were the challenges involved in this project, namely, the implementation of an information system adhering to international cultural heritage standards (Getty's CDWA), the content enrichment process which involved the direct input from the senior curator and heritage researcher, the performance of the system with respect to how long the visitor has to wait for information to be displayed on the PDA and, last but not least, the RFID (wireless) chip technology which presented a problem because of the temperature at the museum."

Smartmuseum is only one of a number of local efforts being undertaken by Heritage Malta in the area of digitisation. Similar efforts include the 3D documentation at the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, funded by the EEA/ Norwegian Financial Mechanisms. The project will see the creation of a 3D digital model of the site recording all its features in high detail, together with extensive monitoring of the environment within the site.

Malta's national authority for heritage conservation is also taking part in other EU initiatives such as the European Digital Library Initiative; Athena, which brings together relevant stakeholders and content owners from all over Europe, to facilitate the inclusion of new digital content into Europeana; and CARARE, a proposal to establish a best practice network to improve the interoperability of digital content relating to Europe's heritage sites with Europeana and possibly other services.

Heritage Malta is also constantly enriching its digital library of over one million digital assets in the form of images, documents and videos related to Malta's National Collection. This is achieved by its documentation and ICT department, using innovative techniques and equipment in the field of digitisation. The department also services the Conservation Division in the field of documentation of conservation and restoration interventions through services such as infrared photography, ultra violet photography and computer aided design technology.