The China Digital Museum Project

Abstract

The China Digital Museum Project is a collaborative project between the Chinese Ministry of Education, Hewlett-Packard Company and several Chinese universities, including Beijing Normal University and Beihang University.

Many universities in China have one or more museums. In order to improve access to the artefacts in these museums, these universities are undertaking the digitisation of those artefacts. The principal aim of this project is to provide these universities with infrastructure based on DSpace to store, manage, preserve and disseminate the digitised versions of the artefacts. In the final phase of the project, there will be around 100 university museums with digital artefacts stored in federated DSpace installations.

In fulfilling this requirement, we need to address many problems associated with managing distributed digital asset management, including persistent identifiers, metadata standardisation, deployment processes and management, and content and metadata replication.

Another challenge that this project faces is how to consolidate the very diverse digital assets each university museum manages so that users can navigate the entire collection by subject. Hence we aim to create "virtual museums", formed by arrangements of digital assets by subject, regardless of physical location.

In this presentation we will describe the project and our current progress.