Digital content development of folklore artifacts and activities for folklore education

Abstract

Digital preservation of museum artifacts has been widely promoted by governments around the world in recent years. However, the artifacts collected by national or local museums are not very exhaustive. Recently, the collected folklore artifacts accompanied with crafts in how to make them and skills and rituals in how to use them have been digitized in Taiwanese Folklore Museum. In order to supplement insufficiency of artifacts collected by the museum, folklore hobbyists are regularly invited to demonstrate their private collections. At the mean time, the task force of digital preservation team digitizes the artifacts for extending its contents. Another way to aggressively increase the number of digitized contents is to sign cooperation agreements with members of the folklore associations by giving services to digitize their personal collections. After having extended the digital contents, we expect that the website of Taiwanese Folklore Museum will become even more popular for teachers and students, especially in kindergartens and elementary schools, to extract and prepare useful materials for folklore education. In conclusion, the paper presents the digital contents which include folklore artifacts and folklore activities developed in Taiwan Folklore Museum. Additionally, other digital contents developed in other museums or personal collectors can be retrieved by using XML technique. The scheme supplements the insufficiency of national or local museums and provides inter-museum architecture for supporting more complete contents for folklore education. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.