Case study: Groningen museums
Museumhuis Groningen | Groningen
Nationaal Rijtuigmuseum | Leek
Open-air museum Het Hoogeland | Warffum
Stichting Oude Groninger Kerken | Groningen
Four small cultural heritage organisations based in the province of Groningen are evaluating the possibilities of jointly presenting their collections and knowledge to a broad audience. Collectively, they manage an impressive range of objects and documents.
Activities
The Open-air museum Het Hoogeland in Warffum consists of various huts and houses, company and public buildings that are partly inhabited or set up with original items, or accommodate various exhibitions.
The Nationaal Rijtuigmuseum (National Carriage Museum) in Leek provides a historical overview of carriage-based travel in the Netherlands. It has a large collection of carriages, horse-sleighs, tacks, saddles, tools, paintings, engravings and clothes.
Stichting Oude Groninger Kerken (Old Churches of Groningen Foundation) manages 57 unique church buildings and various other monuments. Its objective is to preserve the cultural heritage of the province of Groningen through the purchase, restoration and maintenance of historical objects. The foundation organisations activities including guided tours and excursions, develops educational packages in collaboration with other parties and publishes booklets, route descriptions, CDs and maps that are intended to attract the attention of sponsors, volunteers and other interested parties.
Stichting Museumhuis Groningen (The Museum House Groningen Foundation) consists of the Federatie van Musea (Museum Federation) of the province of Groningen and the Museumstichting Groningen (Groningen Museum Foundation). The Federation promotes the interests of 45 museums and collection-forming organisations. The Museumstichting Groningen provides consultancy, initiates projects and sees to a proper set-up of museum infrastructures. Museumhuis Groningen also offers a platform and support to administrators, volunteers and other involved parties at the sixteen borgen (country houses and country-house-like farmhouses) in the province of Groningen.
Knowledge sharing
The objective of the four cultural heritage organisations is to make their "treasures" as widely accessible as possible, both by means of each other's websites and through educational and tourist programmes. As part of the RNA project, the local databases and reference structures of these four organisations are accommodated in a single content repository including articles, object descriptions and the like. Each organisation is able to build its own website on top of this repository with a customised interface while using all the content in the repository, including the content of other organisations. Visitors can search for information from the website of one of the four organisations and are offered all relevant knowledge without having to surf from one organisation's website to the other.
The content repository can also be used for educational and tourist programmes. By adding special labels to the images and object descriptions, they can be used in educational packages and, e.g., tourist route descriptions with a cultural-historical touch.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007