An Approach to the Digital Museum - Multimedia Systems for an Ethnology Museum

We evaluated the usefulness of a Hypermedia Exhibit Guide System, a Hypermedia Learning System, a Multimedia Database Retrieval System, and a Remote Video Question System as museum education tools at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. All the systems were considered acceptable by visitors to the museums,and seemed to help them become more familiar with exhibited artifacts. Among other reasons: (1) they allowed visitors to spontaneously access all the museum's information through interactive operations of the multimedia systems; (2) they presented the results in unexpected ways; and (3) they increased the visitor's awareness of the existence of the people behind the exhibition. Several key issues needed to be addressed in order to make multimedia systems useful tools for museum education: (1) definition of a museum's contents and establishment of a model of the museum's entire information; (2) development of principles and methods for multimedia system design; (3) definition of specifications for museum multimedia education systems based on participation, freedom, profoundity,and affordability; and (4) establishment of a new multimedia based exhibition concept.