A Look at the Spanish Museums: Dissemination of Digital Cultural Heritage

Spanish museums are proud of cultural assets preserved at their institutions. To please a contemporary person, however, they should not only make their expositions attractive but to also present their collections online. Such portals and virtual exhibitions invite attention and increase museums’ popularity. In this brief review several Spanish portals presenting digital content will be discussed and thus you are kindly invited to visit them.

A Look at the Spanish Museums: an Integrated Documentation and Museum Management System DOMUS

For almost a decade Spanish museums have been using DOMUS, an integrated collections documentation and museum management system. Triggered by the new technological challenges and aiming for the modernisation of museums and their management, in 1996 the Spanish Ministry of Culture initiated the development of the system. It is obvious today that the direction towards an integrated museum system that cultural policy makers took was, indeed, far-sighted; at this moment, there are more than 150 museums that use DOMUS for their collections documentation and promotion.

A visiting seminar “The Digitisation of Museum Objects, and the Compilation of Classifications and Thesauruses in Lithuanian and Czech Museums”

On September 20-25, 2010 the specialists from Lithuanian Museums’ Centre for Information, Digitisation and LIMIS (LM IDC LIMIS) which functions as a separate department in the Lithuanian Art Museum visited several museums in Czech Republic where they met with their colleagues specialising in digitisation and information technologies.

International visiting seminar “Experience of Cultural Heritage Digitisation in the Baltic States: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania”

4th November 2009 a group of LM IDC LIMIS specialists attended seminars in Latvia and Estonia. First, they met with the head of “Culture information systems“ – a state agency of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia – as well as the project managers responsible for digitisation. The participants shared their experience gained in the field of exhibits digitisation and the development of integral systems. Next day Conservation Centre Kanut in Tallinn hosted a conference-seminar on digitisation. The representatives of LM IDC LIMIS and several Estonian memory institutions discussed various subject matters: collections management software MuIS, virtual exhibition system and other digitisation projects. LM IDC LIMIS workers delivered presentations about the centre and the development of the Lithuanian Integral Museum Information System (LIMIS).