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Stories Told: Tribal Communities and the Development of Virtual Museums: Mark Christal, Loriene Roy and Antony Cherian
DOI link for Stories Told: Tribal Communities and the Development of Virtual Museums: Mark Christal, Loriene Roy and Antony Cherian
Stories Told: Tribal Communities and the Development of Virtual Museums: Mark Christal, Loriene Roy and Antony Cherian book
Stories Told: Tribal Communities and the Development of Virtual Museums: Mark Christal, Loriene Roy and Antony Cherian
DOI link for Stories Told: Tribal Communities and the Development of Virtual Museums: Mark Christal, Loriene Roy and Antony Cherian
Stories Told: Tribal Communities and the Development of Virtual Museums: Mark Christal, Loriene Roy and Antony Cherian book
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ABSTRACT
Since 1999, Native children, their educators, and Indian community members have been collaborating with museums such as the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) to digitize cultural objects held as part of the museums’ collections. Most notably, these efforts resulted in the development of a virtual tour of two exhibits on display at the NMAI’s George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan. We have reported on the technology we used and on the process we followed in several articles, a dissertation, and at conference presentations including the annual conference of the American Library Association, the first International Indigenous Librarians Forum, the Barents Libraries Conference, ED-Media, the National Oral History Association Conference, the National Association of Native American Studies, and the Museums and the Web 2001 Conference.1 In short, children attending tribal schools traveled to the George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan to create three-dimensional movies of objects that were de-installed from exhibits and moved temporarily to an impromptu photography lab. These object movies were linked to panoramic movies of exhibit areas, creating a virtual space that mimicked the experience of being in the museum space. The students also wrote essays interpreting the objects. These essays became the HTML text labels for the virtual museum. The resulting Web site at http://www.conexus.si.edu/vrtour/ includes the history of the project, image maps of the floor plans of the two museum exhibits, text labels, thumbnail photographs of the digitized objects, and the linked virtual tour. With the free QuickTime plug-in from Apple Computer, Web site visitors can view the virtual tour in any standard Web browser.