Interconnectivity of Data and Access to Museum Content

I am Ben Heller, a previous RIT student working to finish my thesis and Museum Studies degree. I live in Ohio currently and am working remotely, but it is nice to see everyone else's entries and see what others are working on.

My thesis is about creating a shared platform for museums to upload and manage their collections in a way that gives visitors easy access. A large database backend and then a universal application solves this easily, and it becomes a simple question of getting museums on board and visitors interested in using it. Creating an ecosystem that increases visitors desire to learn and ease of discovering new content to visit helps fuel the museums as well.

This is the Louvre app, but the interface is simple and somewhat similar to what I have in mind.

For those interested, here's the abstract:

The evolution of the internet and devices allowing access to it show that users trend towards networking and interconnectivity in their daily lives. (Museum of Chicago, Tech in Everyday Life) Many museums have started to tread into this territory on their own, but most still use simple tours and recordings. A large shared database of museum content ranging from photos of artifacts to historic documents and videos explaining them would allow users to delve further into pieces they enjoy and find similar works at other locations. A single application for all visitors to access and all museums to share would greatly benefit both said visitors as well as the museums themselves. This thesis will survey existing applications in museums, statistics of users of museum mobile offerings and the networks that museums are currently using for access. A variety of institution types will be surveyed for their insight including The Cleveland Art Museum, Science Center and Natural History. It will then prototype a shared network topology allowing museums to share data and allow users remote access to content as well as design the application to access such content.