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== EIGHT EUROPEAN MUSEUMS TEAMING UP FOR EMN.And Where to Go From Now == Achim Lipp, European Museums Network EMN, Winfried Schmitz-Esser , Germany, 1993<br>
This paper is a report on the European Museums' Network (EMN), a telecommunications and multimedia project initiated and fostered under the EEC "RACE" programme in the past four years. It also includes the outcomes of the project and the lessons it taught us for future inter-museums' multimedia co-operation.
Eight museums from eight European cities, namely Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Den Haag, Bremen, Bremerhaven, Copenhagen and Hamburg, teamed up for the venture, plus four technical partners rooted in six European countries.
=== The objective ===
The objective of the project was to develop, within a time span of four years (1989 -1992) an interactive, networked multimedia system which complied with two main requirements:
The eight Museums had been specialising in the areas of: Fine arts, ethnography, technology, archaeology and science. With the wealth of their contributions, they could be expected to constitute, in some way, a realistic profile of the creative and informative potential of European museums.
=== The challenge ===
The challenge was that any interested layman should be offered easy, uncomplicated access to the treasures of that collection, as well as orientational help and animation. He should be free to navigate through the documents, to discover themes and topics, and to visualise and elaborate on them in a widely unrestricted way together with related material collected from the most distant places, and of all kinds of sources.
The EMN project was ready for presentation to the public by mid 1992, and formally ended by the end of that same year. The experience gathered by the participating partners throughout Europe, and the response of both, the expert community and the general public, are now being evaluated. So far, this process has yielded some most encouraging comments. Especially so, in the Museum World the opening-up of new perspectives for the organisation of visual knowledge sources as shown in a real World environment, is meeting with interest and curiosity.
In fact, the EMN project has triggered off co-operation and interaction between museum experts of the various scientific disciplines. It was proven that, with the help of new electronic media, barriers between the various museum collections can be overcome, and that it is in fact possible to integrate a common stock of pictures and other documents in what one may call a “Virtual Multimedia Museum”.
=== Imagine ===
Imagine a visitor sitting down at one of the micro-computers installed in the information cabinet of a particular museum.
Although, unfortunately, the co-operation of the partners came to an end with the termination of the funding of the project, most of the museums involved are going on still feeding the system. So, the data base of the EMN is steadily growing. The memory is extendable, and multimedia production is easy to learn. The system is freely portable and can be installed in every museum, so that it is a safe assumption that more museums will join the venture. Each museum is free to contribute additions to the data pool at its discretion. This may be carried out not only by the museum professionals proper, but by experts of all kinds.
=== Two special programs === Two special programs have been developed as part of the project, according to the requirements elaborated and put forth by the experts of the participating museums. It was a condition that all data should be "real life", and much care was given to the question of how to prevent boredom, or even the creation of what one day could at best be considered an impressive data cemetery.=== The Visitor Program ===The Visitor Program of the EMN system provides two different ways of approach, the <big>Keyword Navigation </big> and <big>Guided Tours</big>.
Guided Tours follows a more traditional way of informing and teaching. This part was set up by museum experts, like educators and curators, or by school teachers and professors.
Every museum is free to implement its own Guided Tour. In terms of the EMN project, the Guided Tour may be considered as the standard way to access the knowledge sources contained in the system.
=== The Keyword Navigation ===<big>The Keyword Navigation is the more important, and truly innovative part of the Visitor Program. Keyword navigation was designed in order to enable a general public supposed to have no specific or scientific interests, and a dislike of being taught, a verbal more game like approach to the exhibits of cultural relevance.</big>
The visitor is free to choose his own words, and at any time is in full command of the steps he may be inspired to take on his trip around the international, pluri-disciplinary museum landscape, whereby he may discover new and even surprising correlations between the artefacts “on show”, their history, meanings, motives and values.
=== Let us assume === Let us assume that the adventurous tour starts with a local museum object. Once picked at the click of a mouse, the system would display the object on the high-resolution colour screen. After having explored different aspects offered along with the picture in the information package, he is invited to browse in a special window featuring a maximum of 50 everyday life keywords that have been attributed to the object in the course of the distributed input process. In these keywords, not only the proper meaning and background of the object is reflected, but also its sensitive and associative potential.
The user then picks and clicks out of the pool a set of terms which he associates most with the object. The system will prompt with a choice of objects out of the common pool that matches with these keywords. The display then is a set of minipictures along with the terms which caused the selection of the new pictures. These ones can now be enlarged, one by one, and their corresponding information and multimedia background can be explored. Each point of interest may then serve as a starting point to further navigation, and further gathering of information.
On top of this, each exhibit has to be provided with a set of keywords which, in the navigation, acts as link to other objects on show. A common pool of more than 1,000 terms has been developed so far covering all the exhibits entered in the system. The composer and producer, in his indexing procedure, has to stick to the pool of terms as it stands at the moment of entry.
=== Efficient and imaginative indexing ===
Efficient and imaginative indexing is a crucial job, since it is clear that the choice of the terms decides on both, clear orientation in navigation, and associative power of the system. It is not surprising, therefore, and no secret at all, that the content of the keyword pool was, and still is, a subject of permanent and vivid discussion.
This, then, and in more general terms, of course, would be the answer:
=== Little is known ===
Little is known about how a future user can be expected to approach a multimedia document bank.
One assumption is that he/she will try it by means of words (terms), and that these terms will feature some obvious relations (e.g. proximity) to the object or to the idea (target) he/she is looking for.
Of course, the success of such a system heavily depends on a good input, i.e. the quality not only of the pictures collected, but also of the descriptive texts (captions, and other picture-related word material) coming along with the pictures.
=== A homogeneous text base === A homogeneous text base is a prime condition for the construction of the thesaurus which has to be built on the basis of the term material presented in the captions and other picture-related text material.
This is why, from the very beginning of the collecting activities, utmost stress has to be put not only on a top quality of the pictures, but also of their respective texts. These descriptions must strictly follow a matrix of informative and linguistic requirements, and this matrix, including a number of sample texts, has to be set up beforehand. The validity, as well as formal quality of both, pictures and texts, must be continuously monitored in the course of the operation.
