What do we know about on-line museums? A study about current situation of virtual art museums
Résumé
The increasing investment in R&D concerning virtual museums (VM) in the last years attests a concrete interest of the cultural market to enlarge and promote the offer of innovative museum services using ICT. Invoking them in the conception of museum services, we affect the technological paradigm that underlies the cultural and/or patrimonial and/or educational intention of the museum. Indeed, through ICT, the museum material and role espouse new forms and functions insofar as not only objects but also representations of objects and even virtual creations that nowadays can be considered as an exhibition material. But the introduction of ICT to the museums and specially the creation of VM, also affect other notions about what a museum is considered to be: the massive diffusion and the domestication of new technologies lead to new practices. Indeed, in a VM, semiotic production (museology schemata) and reception (reading strategies of the visitor) are both modified. Under the pretext of wanting to bring closer their collections to users and the idea of putting visitors as their center of interest instead of works of art, the virtual visit points out the importance of electronic documents, as far as visiting a VM turns into consulting a database of artworks. Thus, the first notion of VM became rapidly uncertain by its consecutive superpositions, bridgings, hybridizations, mutations, associations, etc. of traditional museum practices. In our paper we will try to contribute to a better understanding of the diversity and the evolution of VM and their particular use of ICT to make closer works of art to all visitors/users. We will also provide a critical overview of some current R&D trends of on-line museums. With this aim, we use classic structuralism principles in order to outline a state of the art of todays VMs. Clearly, as VM is a means of web display of almost any collection of objects, some limitations were necessary: our focus is on virtual art museums. Studying a corpus of one hundred virtual museums, we propose a systematic research and analysis of art museums leading to some classification principles (their design, the type of information given, how this information is presented, some ergonomic aspects, and the specific uses of ICTs that do enrich them with a real added value). We try to find some evidence concerning the relationship between VM genres. Finally we, discuss how all these aspects work together to give to visitors a global vision of the museum and to establish links with them. As conclusions of our particular study, we notice that there is a major disproportion between the different categories of VMs, which may be explained from the fact that VMs were initially born as showcases of real museums and rather as an advertising tool. This influence has limited the creation of other types of VMs, in the sense that real museums websites have imposed a pre-established vision about the way the collections have to be exhibited and the information has to be presented On the other hand, the idea of VM has since considerably evolved; not only because ICTs evolve, but also because of a shift of the market, that gradually incorporates new cultural and social practices.