Virtual Museums and the Incorporation of Animation
Pathfinder Introduction
prepared by Mark Blair
With the growing ubiquity of the World Wide Web, museums throughout the world are creating digitized reflections and extensions of themselves—virtual museums—online. As is the case in the physical world, online museums must compete with a brood of entertainment and educational sites for the attention of potential visitors. The incorporation of animation into a virtual museum is a tool that museum professionals and website designers can use to enhance the aesthetic experience and educational impact of the visit, and ultimately the viability of the website itself.
For purposes of this pathfinder, the definition of animation is limited to the concept of a succession of still images simulating motion, existing in the electronic domain. Digital video (such as QuickTime movies), sound, and still images, while bordering on the topic of animation, are not considered directly.
This pathfinder has been created for fellow students in Professor Loriene Roy’s Information Resources in the Humanities course, as well as for persons outside the class who are interested in pursuing a career in (virtual) museum education and/or computer animation. The sources I selected are restricted to those available at the UT General Libraries or on the World Wide Web. The bulk of my chosen sources are web-based, due to the relative currency of documents in that medium. (Web animation is still a fairly young subject that is rapidly evolving. Publications less than three years old are desirable, if not essential.) Several directories for relevant services and organizations have been included in the bibliography, as well as the portal to an online newsgroup.
It must be said that while it was my desire to find sources that discussed computer animation and the virtual museum in tandem, the search proved mostly futile. However, I believe that much of the knowledge contained within sources about computer animation can be applied fairly easily to the realm of the virtual library, and vice-versa. Three examples of museum websites with sophisticated infusions of computer animation are included in the bibliography, as a means of showing what can be done.
Using this pathfinder should enable the user to answer such questions as: What kinds of computer animation exist? How is computer animation created? Where can one go to find virtual museums, especially those that use animation? What is the history and current relationship of museums and multimedia? What sorts of career/educational paths are available in the field of computer animation/design?
My first step toward building the pathfinder was to search UT’s online catalog (UTNetCAT) for books about computer animation and/or virtual libraries. I used a number of mixed keyword searches, the following examples yielding successful results (i.e. relevant materials):
Similar keywords were entered in the online search engine Google (http://www.google.com), which led to the discovery of several web-based directories and articles. A scouring of postings in the newsgroup <comp.graphics.animation> (which was also found via Google) informed me of the existence of another helpful animation-related directory. Entering the phrase “interactive animation” in the Britannica.com site’s search engine uncovered both a journal article of great relevance to the present topic and a link to a museum site (Questacon) that is exemplary in its incorporation of animation techniques.
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