Building a virtual museum: MusDev

The kiosk version of TAMH was built with another DMC tool, MusDev, designed to transform databases of collection management data and associated images into exciting interactive applications.

The underlying structure of MusDev is a database. This may be one created just for this purpose or may be an existing Collections Management or cataloging application. The main MusDev screens give you an editable view of all of your museum objects whether they are images and descriptions of traditional artefacts or formatted articles, audio recordings, video sequences or other multimedia elements.

These elements can be linked in MusDev using a simple drag and drop interface. This, though, is only the start of the linking which can be done. The database structure means that links are not limited to buttons or hypertext. Objects can be searched for by keywords both in the MusDev builder and in the kiosk display. Want to use a hierarchical thesaurus with your keywords? No problem. In the kiosk display, the user can select any word or phrase and search the database at either a keyword/abstract or full- text level. The user is free to explore the virtual museum in the way he or she chooses without following only the curator’s signposts.

The number of images soon builds up. The TAMH project is currently working with around 4000 and this is ever-increasing. MusDev offers tools to aid the management of images and to allow you to specify different versions of images for different applications for, if the database is to be truly useful, it needs to be multi-purpose: collections management, catalogue creation, kiosk creator, Web site source. MusDev makes this possible. The high-resolution images you use for the kiosk or on-house need too much bandwidth on the Internet so, instead of creating and maintaining multiple versions of images manually, let MusDev create thumbnails for you automatically, making intelligent decisions about scaling and content wherever possible.

We are working hard to make the publishing transition between kiosk and Web as simple as possible by bringing MusDev and WebDev closer together. Although the kiosk and Web versions of TAMH look very different, the underlying data is managed by MusDev.

In addition to our in-house work, we will be looking to use MusDev and WebDev on joint development projects with museums and galleries world-wide.