Bringing museums online

Abstract

Recently, many public authorities or private entities have undertaken efforts to digitalize important parts of cultural heritage such as paintings, sculptures, monuments, ancient manuscripts, musical instruments, historical furniture and photographs. Digitalization means creating databases containing images, reference documents, factual data, and sounds describing as precisely as possible the items constituting the cultural heritage. The aim was to ensure the interoperability of networks for open multimedia access to major museums and galleries and to ensure the accesibility of collections to the public. An overview of the organization aspects of publishing and distributing large collections of materials on the Internet is presented.