Bridging the Collection Management System - Multimedia Exhibition Divide: A New Architecture for Modular Museum Systems

A major cause of architectural inconsistency in current museum software systems is the noninteroperability of Collection Management (CMS) and Multimedia Exhibition Systems. Until today, building a n integrated museum system, i.e. a software system encompassing the two types of application, has proven to be a particularly difficult task, often leading to unsatisfactory results. On one side. Collection Management Systems are expected to host a variety of diverse media formats, and lag behind when it comes to granting access to thcm in ways they were not designed for, on the other side, multimedia applications deployed inside museums arc just static incarnations of ordinary multimedia productions, failing to keep up with thc dynamic reality of museum collections bchind them. T o cffectivcly provide improved access and management of multimedia contents. Collection Management Systcms and multimedia delivery systems inside museums must bc rethought and designed in parallel, with cach other in mind. The present paper describes our efforts on this subject, the design of an integrated museum system easily accommodating new and unexpected media formats and description standards. The C M S backstage application is capable to provide active online feed to the multimedia presentation applications built relying on it. The result is a sustainable and alive system, heavily based on the concepts of distributed objects, scripting and skinning, easily adaptable when deployed inside a new