CHAPTER ONE
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Digital museums appeared in the Internet many years ago. First digital museums have emerged since 1991. However, despite the identity and quality of exhibitions their exhibits are comparable with traditional art museum publications albums, catalogues and books, while the Internet can create a qualitatively new displays, where previously impossible or inconsistent methods of display historical and artistic heritage have been set up. What is the identity of the museum, in which you enter? The main feature is that here are collections, which actually stored in different museums in different countries or even on different continents or does not exist at all.
1.2 What is a digital museum?
The first definition of what a digital museum is, was simply the website of a physical museum. A concept of a museum “without walls” had, however, been introduced as early as 1953 by Malraux, who imagined it being an environment for the presentation of mainly photography and art. The term Digital museum was first coined by Tsichritzis and Gibbs in their article Digital museums and digital realities referring to a museum constructed for a digital landscape and functioning as a service rather then a location.
Another early idea of the digital museum was the VR digital museum that was a copy of the physical museum in its architecture, and it generally contained 2D and 3D images of items from the museum’s collections. The digital museum later evolved to refer to web sites of museums that contained different types of media (multimedia) to present information, such as images, text, sound etc.22 This is still partly the case, but a digital museum is today considered to hold a larger complexity then just different types of media-presented information on a site. The digital museums have become a matter of not just basic information, but also of how the information is being presented to the users.
1.3 Definitions of a digital museum
The definition and idea of the digital museum is still under construction. Just as with the technology, the idea and definition is under constant change, and what once might have qualified as a digital museum in its encyclopedic definition, may not do so today.
Today the definition of the digital museum is coming closer to that of what a physical museum is. It is no longer only a website with information presented.
1.4    STATEMENTS OF THE PROBLEM
Museums are physical locations which cannot be accessed without a visit to these physical locations. Museums contain artefacts of cultural heritage and history which people need to have access to reinforce a sense of history and cultural identity. People cannot have access to museum that is hundred of kilometres from them. Existing physical museum even when they are close, are normally so fully booked that people cannot have access to them unless they book months in advance. This study is focused on finding a solution to these problems where people can have access to the museum even when the physical artefacts are far away.