A digital museum infrastructure for preserving community collections from climate change

Abstract

Climate change poses a real and present threat to cultural heritage. Responses to climate change have focussed on strategies for prevention and physical protection. Developments in technology have made possible a new type of virtual museum that actively supports the work of museums and enables the creation of immersive digital exhibits. This paper proposes that it is important to address the role that community museums play in the digital preservation of natural and cultural heritage. It focusses on the contribution of virtual museums and proposes a distributed virtual museum architecture to support digital preservation.The architecture addresses both the need for high quality local interactions that enables preservation and the need for a global infrastructure that makes the results accessible and enables the development of links between communities.