The Potentials of the Digital Cultural Heritage: A Best Practice Example of Presentation and Use. The Digital Representation of the Hans Gross Kriminalmuseum

Abstract

The project Repository of Styrian cultural heritage (Wissenschaftserbe website) studied aspects of museum documentation and presentation by asking how digital methods can strengthen the use of digitisation of tangible cultural heritage. One of the participating partners was the Hans-Gross-Kriminalmuseum, a collection within the cross-faculty platform university museums (überfakultärer Leistungsbereich Universitätsmuseen) at University of Graz (university museum website). The project was realized in cooperation with the Center for information modelling offering the technical knowledge and undertaking the implementation to provide (meta)data online. In this context, this paper addresses the question of the significance of digital technologies for presentation and use of tangible cultural heritage by the example of a special case study. It acts on the assumption that presentations of museum objects in the virtual space cannot compete with real museum exhibitions, as they cannot replace an encounter with the original object. Therefore virtually represented collection complexes are also tools for expert users to research and for non-expertusers to browse through the collection. This paper demonstrates these presuppositions using the example of the physical museum collection of Hans-Gross -Kriminalmuseum at the University of Graz.