A virtual museum guide agent that uses human relationship-building behaviors to engage museum visitors is described. The agent, named “Tinker”, appears in the form of a human-sized anthropomorphic robot, and uses nonverbal conversational behavior, empathy, social dialogue, reciprocal selfdisclosure and other relational behavior to establish social bonds with users. Tinker can describe exhibits ...

The museum provides the perfect setting for the convergence of culture, reflection, personal connections, and communication, and many museums supplement these visitor experiences through the use of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems. While there has been past HCI research on various combinations of these four areas, the overall goal of this study is to explore the emotional links museum v...

The applied CDi technology has attracted many visitors since the very day the Museum was inaugurated in 1991. It was discovered that a very large segment of the public that initially visited the Museum during the first stage, came specifically for the application, and not its content. They were engineers who wanted to see, firsthand, in their own country, the actual application of a technology ...

The 2011 opening at the Computer History Museum of the world’s largest and most complete physical and cyber exhibit of computing history marks the sixth stage of a public museum’s evolution, which began in 1975 with a closet-sized exhibit in a Digital Equipment Corporation building, migrating to The Computer Museum, Boston. It now lives in an 119,000 square foot public home in Silicon Valley. T...

The relationship between museums and mass media as well as the possible impact of information technology on museums are described. The “virtual museum” is defined as a means to establish access, context, and outreach by using information technology. The Internet opens the “virtual museum” to an interactive dialog with virtual visitors and invites them to make a virtual museum experience that is...

1 Species 2000, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, 2333 CR, Th e Netherlands 2 Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, 20A Inverleith Row, Edinburgh EH3 5LR, Scotland, UK; and Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto 3 Missouri Botanical Garden, P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, Missouri 63166-0299, USA (address for correspondence: Botany Department, Th e Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chi...

The last few years several museum networking projects have been started and completed or are still ongoing. The European Museum Network (EMN) and Remote Access to Museum Archives (RAMA), to name only two, are examples of these projects. The museum world is becoming aware that relevant information may be obtained from all over the world, and that co-operation between museums is no longer limited...

The proposed service suggest the visitor a museum which is currently better to attend, based on visitor preferences and current situation in the region. For this purpose, smart environments of region museums have to be organized. The smart environment is a decentralized infrastructure which allows different devices to share required information between them. Every user of the smart museum servi...

Even if knowledge is a commodity that a museum offers as Hooper-Greenhill has argued, the mechanisms of how a museum comes to know what it mediates are not well understood. Using a case study approach the aim of this study is to investigate what types of sources and channels, with a special emphasis on social processes and structures of information, support collaborative information work and th...

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indir...