Populating the Hermitage Museum's new web site
Fred Mintzer, Gordon W. Braudaway, Francis P. Giordano, Jack C. Lee, Karen A. Magerlein, Silvana D'Auria, Amnon Ribak, Gil Shapir, Fabio Schiattarella, John Tolva, Andrey Zelenkov · Communications of the ACM · 2001
Russia's palatial state Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg possesses many great collections including prehistoric art, antiquities, Western European art, and numismatics. This article reports the joint efforts of software company IBM Corp. and Hermitage, who began exploring the nature of museum information services that would best serve the museum, in 1997. Three end-user applications were identified for development , that would permit the Hermitage's collections to be searched and better experienced from afar. The multimedia based education programs were created to serve Hermitage visitors, especially children by providing interactive art education. The visitor information kiosks were created to help Hermitage visitors choose a set of holdings to visit and then navigate the museum in order to see them. The web site was created to serve remote patrons by familiarizing them with the Hermitage's holdings, its history, news, temporary exhibitions, and the visitors service it provides. The digital library enables the browsing and searching provided by the site. It generates dynamic pages for specifying browsing and search, execute the search, and prepares dynamic pages that presents the search results.