Why

The initial motivation for Virtual Museum was to display a collection of early computer hardware on the Web. The collection is currently not documented in any way, and, with the passage of time, the generation of people who know about the items in the collection is growing smaller and smaller.

For this particular collection, it was important to allow for documentation activities by a core of enthusiastic users and also by knowledgeable others who do not want to become heavily involved in documentation.

After looking around, it appeared hat there was no software available to allow collection documentation by both enthusiasts and the more casually involved but knowledgeable user.

To fill this gap, this software was developed.

What

The basic structure of Virtual Museum is that of a wiki with commenting facilities that are more friendly than standard wiki (eg Wikimedia) talk facilities. Thus collection item descriptions can be developed by users who feel like using a formatting language for page content, and comments can be used to easily add related information. Over time comment-supplied information can be moved into the main pages.

In this way Virtual Museum makes adding knowledge into a lightweight operation for the casual user.

Features

Strikethrough is used to indicate features still to be implemented:

• A basic authorisation scheme:

  • Contributors must have registered themselves as users and logged in.
  • Contributors may also authenticate with Twitter (other services will be added).
  • Admin users can perform a few privileged operations.

• Wiki pages, with the ability to add comments to them.

• Resources may be added to particular pages. Primarily this is to support the collection of photographs and other documents around collection items.

• Wiki pages support rich content:

  • Text.
  • Hyperlinks to other pages, in the normal wiki faswhion.
  • URLs to other pages ont he web
  • Images and YouTube and eventually Vimeo videos.

• Audio comments for those who don't feel like typing.

• Wiki pages may also be formatted using Markdown, a simple text formatting language.

• Page are identified and searchable via tags and categories, both of which may be easily manipulated.

• Pages have a simple system-wide type system to aid certain end user operations.

• The category scheme for pages based on a customisable Linked Data representation of hierarchies of categories.

• Repository and collection specific information: permalinks (only kind of at the moment), colleciton item numbering and location fields on pages with a type of collection item.

• RDF generation of collection data for linked data aficionados.

Status

Reached production level, strike through indicates 'still to be implemented'

Licence

A slightly modified MIT Open source licence appears in the source code. Users are required to keep a footer item and inform the developers of their use of the system.