Int J Digit Libr (2005) 5: 231–251 / Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s00799-005-0116-1
Toward an integrateddigitalmuseum system–
theChi Nan experiences
Jen-Shin Hong
1
, Bai-Hsuan Chen
1
, Sheng-Hao Hung
1
,JiehHsiang
2,∗
1
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan
e-mail: {jshong, s0321901, hung}@ncnu.edu.tw
2
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
e-mail: hsiang@csie.ntu.edu.tw
Published online: 6 April 2005 –  Springer-Verlag 2005
Abstract. The essential activities of a museum are mul-
tifaceted and include collection, preservation, research,
exhibition, education, and entertainment. Hence, the
march toward a full-fledged digital museum must evolve
from the digital library concept with the addition of var-
ious interactive edutainment modules. In this paper, we
describe various phases of the digital museum systems
constructed by the National Chi Nan University, Tai-
wan, over the past few years. The design concepts and
integration issues of essential digital museum modules
are addressed. We have as our long-term goal the con-
struction of an integrated digital museum that provides
digital archives with user-friendly information access in-
terfaces, intriguing virtual exhibitions, adaptive online
courseware, and adaptive interactive games. A mechan-
ism to facilitate the implementation of large-scale aes-
thetic exhibitions has been proposed. Our approach, the
fine-grained modularization of aesthetic hypermedia pre-
sentations, concerns the balance between the complexity
in the authoring process, the aesthetic qualities of final
hypermedia presentations, and efforts at style template
implementation. Moreover, various experiences and eval-
uations of content-based image retrieval, online course-
ware, and online interactive games will also be addressed.
Future work toward an integrated digital museum sys-
tem is proposed. Our digital museums can be accessed at
http:// dlm.ncnu.edu.tw.
Keywords: Digital museum – Hypermedia software en-
gineering – Aesthetic Web publishing
∗
This work was supported by the National Science Council and
National Council of Cultural Affairs, Taiwan
1 Introduction
As definedby theUKMuseumOrganization in 1998, “Mu-
seums enable people to explore collections for inspiration,
learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that col-
lect, safeguard and make accessible artefacts and speci-
menswhichtheyholdintrustforsociety.”
1
Convention-
ally, museums disseminate and communicate the mean-
ings of cultural heritage and play a vital role in the ad-
vancement of human cultures. In contrast to libraries,mu-
seums usually aggressively develop and implement effect-
ive outreach programs.Thus the essential activities ofmu-
seums are naturally more multifaceted and include collec-
tions, preservation, research, exhibitions, education, and
entertainment. In thepast, due togeographical and logisti-
cal constraints, conventional physicalmuseums posed cer-
tain access limitations for people in dispersed locations.
Fortunately, thanks to the development of the Web and
multimedia technologies, museum collections may now be
digitized and disseminated using advancedmedia and net-
work technologies.Thesedigitalmuseumartifacts cannow
be within the reach of our educational, entertainment, or
economic systems. The transformation of physical muse-
ums into digital museums offers the possibility of having
museum knowledge accessible to worldwide researchers as
well as the general public.
In contrast to a typical digital library that focuses
on conserving, cataloging, accessing, and tracking the us-
age of digitized materials, a digital museum is a virtual
entitiy in which sets of museum artifacts and a variety
of interactive edutainment activities connected by spe-
cific themes are placed in an integrated environment. The
online activities are expected to provide greater public
awareness of the collections deposited. To this end, many
issues pertaining to the development of digital museums
1
UK Museum Organization, 1998

232 J.-S. Hong et al.: Toward an integrated digital museum system – the Chi Nan experiences
like intellectual efforts, financial considerations, techno-
logical advancements, and overall design requirements
from the museum’s application point of view must be
investigated.
Generally speaking, to create a real effect on end users
through exploration of the best features of a virtual do-
main, a digital museum must be more attractive, inter-
esting, easily accessible, and visually dazzling so as to
catch the attention of users more easily. Hence, the march
toward a full-fledged digital museum must evolve from
digital libraries with the addition of various interactive
edutainment modules. Since visitor outlook toward and
satisfaction with museum attributes may include compre-
hension, discovery, and interactions, the content of digital
museums should be presented with high aesthetic qual-
ities. To realize a digital museum, tremendous work is
involved in integrating different media, metadata, tech-
nologies, and multimedia artistic designs. The software
engineering and the architecture of an integrated digital
museum system should have a broader perspective than
a digital library.
In recent years, with the objective of preserving and
disseminating Taiwan’s precious cultural heritage, the
National Science Council and the National Council of
Cultural Affairs of Taiwan have initiated a series of large-
scale nationwide digital museum projects. The Digital
Archive Lab of the National Chi Nan University has ac-
tively associated with the project and constructed the
Digital Museum of Taiwanese Butterflies, the Lanyu Dig-
ital Museum, the Ali Mountain Digital Museum, and
the Exhibition Management System of the National
Archive of Cultural Heritage. These digital museums
can be accessed at http:// dlm.ncnu.edu.tw. Our goal
is to construct integrated digital museums that provide
user-friendly information access interfaces, intriguing vir-
tual exhibitions, online courses, and educative interactive
games to achieve high attendance levels for these Web
sites. A Web site construction of this kind is a compli-
cated and laborious multidisciplinary task. Certainly, to
facilitate such a digital museum construction, Web site
feature development should be highly automated and use
information technology tools to minimize human inter-
vention and effort.
This paper describes the attempts toward an inte-
grated digital museum system put forward by the Digital
Archive Lab of the National Chi Nan University. In due
course, the goal is to develop a digital museum system
that functions as a “knowledge factory” to facilitate the
generation of essential edutainment modules out of digi-
tal archives. We developed a critical stance toward tech-
nical trends with an eye toward ensuring the delivery of
effective real-world systems. These researches consist of
three major phases, including: (1) explore possible func-
tional modules of a typical digital museum, (2) develop
authoring tools for the essential functional modules and
evaluate the tools so as to define the optimal interfaces
between different modules, and (3) develop intelligent
systems to automate the authoring of the content of the
essential functional modules.
This paper reflects the experiences of the design and
implementation of four real-life digital museum projects.
We wish to highlight various essential factors, both tech-
nical and sociotechnical, involved in the development of
an integrated digital museum. In particular, we have put
much effort into designing mechanisms to efficiently gen-
erate large-scale aesthetic online exhibitions, which we
believe are key elements for a successful digital museum
Web site. With the need for large-scale artistic hyper-
media designs, the construction of digital museum ex-
hibitions is indeed challenging and beyond the scope of
conventional Web publishing software engineering prac-
tices. A practical approach needs to strike a balance
among the complexity in the authoring processes, the
aesthetic qualities of final hypermedia presentations, and
efforts at large-scale style template implementation. Be-
yond the virtual exhibition issues, various design con-
cepts, resource requirements and implementation strate-
gies for content-based image retrievals, online course-
ware, and educative interactive games will be addressed.
For each implementation, primitive evaluations based on
reflection and on the lessons learned from our point of
view will be given. At the end of the article we will pro-
pose a practically implementable integrated digital mu-
seum framework.
2 Explore core digital museummodules:
the Digital Museum of Taiwanese Butterflies
The first phase of our digital museum projects is the Dig-
ital Museum of Taiwanese Butterflies. The content was
provided by the National Museum of Natural Science of
Taiwan (http:// www.nmns.edu.tw). Several faculties in
the Department of Computer Science and Information
Engineering at Chi Nan University initiated this project
and proposed the original ideas for the system architec-
ture, trying to embrace a wide spectrum of advanced mul-
timedia technologies (Fig. 1). The proposed technologies
included image-based 3D rendering, 3D fax, synchronized
multimedia presentation, video on demand, adaptive net-
work bandwidth control for QOS, multimedia database,
multiresolution media encoding, digital watermark, etc.
Most of these technologies were prevalent research sub-
jects in computer science communities at that time. This
proposal reflected the major interests of the engineering
team in developing advanced academically publishable
technologies, without much consideration for the real-life
usability of the system. Unfortunately, as the funding
agency expected the Web site to go public within a year,
most of the original ideas were discarded because of the
poor usability or the long development time required.
After months of technology surveys and discussions
with the content experts, the overall design of the digi-
tal museum was switched to a more pragmatic approach