Online virtual exhibitions: Concepts and design considerations

Online virtual exhibitions (VEs) are acknowledged as important complimentary counterparts to physical exhibitions. It overcomes space, time and location restrictions and allows global visitors to access these priceless and exciting treasures that are stored in museums, archives and other institutions on a 24/7/365 basis. Well constructed VEs can offer alternative experiences to the “real thing” and open up other opportunities that include learning, more content beyond physical exhibits, active participation and contribution by visitors through forums and uploads, online shopping, and others. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review, and illustrates concepts and design considerations for the development of VEs that can be highly effective and efficient with minimal technological knowledge. By considering the important issues of metadata, system architecture design and development techniques, it becomes possible to generate a series of VEs to meet the needs of different user groups and at the same time cater to the constraints of the client computers, thereby providing the users the best possible experience in engaging with the VEs.