Museums meetup event report - Jan 7 2018 Beijing

Dear Art and Culture CG members,

 

Beijing Association for Science and Technology hosted a 4 hour meetup event
to talk about merging of Web and the museums on Jan 7 2018 in Beijing. About
30 representatives from top Chinese museums, public agencies, research
institutes and other interested organizations attended. See detailed
attendee list at the end of this report. 

W3C China Host staffs were invited to give presentations about Web and
standards work of W3C on this event. The 2017 TPAC breakout session and
Art&Culture Community Group discussion were introduced to the audience as
well. In the discussion session later, the follow info was summarized. 

 

1.       General background: 

There are about 108 million movable historical relics and 800 thousands
immovable historical relics in different museums/institutes in China. It is
a very challenging work to digitize, archive and present them online. The
13th Five-Year Program supported by Ministry of Science and Technology has a
national project on standards for Digital protection for cultural relics,
research topics including standard framework, metadata, movable cultural
relics digitization and immovable cultural relics digitization. This project
was finished last month and 102 standards have been developed. These
standards set up a basic support for the content of museum content and the
method to digitize them. However, there is no standard on how the museum
content can be presented on online. Many museums have started their own
efforts trying to present their content online, but the quality varies. And
there is hardly a way that the content can be linked with each other. So,
there is a real need for standards that can help to present the museum
content on the Web as well as make the content interoperable. 

 

2.       Point of Views from attendees 

*the decentralization of Web should be a big inspiration for museums while
we are thinking about next generation of museums. If museums could provide
standard online content for the public, the public will have the right
resources to be creative with the exhibits. People can organize their own
online exhibitions and share the info with more public. That is a new way to
share the museum treasure with the world. 

*digitizing the content/exhibits might be a proper beginning to move the
museum content online. 

*There is a higher demand on technologies while presenting the museum
content on the Web. A notable case is the use of 3D technology. How should
we describe the resource? How should we present them in the cyber space? How
should we index or search them? All big questions need to be answered. 

*many modern museums have multi-media content on their website. The media
file can be big than usual. Data storage and performance should be
considered as well. 

*IP protection is needed in a way of DRM. On the other hand, monetization of
content should be considered too. 

*Objective description of the resource/content is of vital importance. While
developing the standards for description, subjectivity should be avoided as
much as possible. 

*different behaviors of browsers is a problem for online museums. Currently
many museums have their own websites, but the content of their websites,
e.g. HD and 3D content, usually differ from regular websites. The browsers
do not support these content well yet. 

*most of the museums do not have a strong technical background or resource.
To move forward, we could start from use cases and requirements.

*funded projects would be preferred for further work on this topic. 

 

The audience reached the consensus that further conversations and meetings
were needed to push things forward. And joining the global community on this
topic is a good idea too. 

 

 

Attendee List 

Chinese Academy of Science http://www.cas.cn/ 

Baidu https://www.baidu.com 

The Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage
http://www.bjww.gov.cn/ 

Chinese Museums Association http://cnmuseum.cnki.net/ 

Ministry of Culture http://www.mcprc.gov.cn/ 

National Base for International Cultural Trade http://www.bjfreeport.com/ 

National Museum of China http://www.chnmuseum.cn/ 

China National Institute of Standardization http://www.cnis.gov.cn/ 

The Geological Museum of China http://www.gmc.org.cn/ 

Chinese National Museum of Ethnology http://www.cnmuseum.com/ 

China Railway Museum http://www.china-rail.org/ 

Zhihua Temple http://www.zhihuatemple.com/

Beijing Capital Museum http://www.capitalmuseum.org.cn/

The Palace Museum http://en.dpm.org.cn/ 

China Science and Technology Museum http://cstm.cdstm.cn/ 

Beijing Museum of Natural History http://www.bmnh.org.cn/ 

Beijing Association for Science and Technology http://www.bast.net.cn/ 

Beijing Association for Digital Science and Technology Popularization
http://www.dbast.cn/ 

 

Angel 

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Angel Li 

Manager of W3C China Host & W3C Global Participation Lead

Beihang University, No.37 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, China

Phone: 86-10-82316341  Cell:86-13810176889 

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