Digital railway museum: An approach to introduction of digital exhibition systems at the railway museum

Abstract

Museum is considered as an important application field for digital media technologies. In conventional museum exhibition, museum curators have tried to convey wisdom of mankind to the visitors by displaying real exhibits. Meanwhile, such conventional method for exhibition cannot tell vivid background information about the exhibit such as the social situation where it was made and the mechanism how it worked. Digital media can be used for enhancing delivery efficiency by providing the ability to express background information about exhibits. Based on this idea, we introduced digital exhibition systems, which help us to understand background information of exhibits, into THE RAILWAY MUSEUM (Japan) and held the "Digital Railway Museum" exhibition. In this paper, we describe about the exhibition and report on and knowledge and implication obtained from the exhibition. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.