"museum4punkt0": Sub-project Explain, understand and participate in research in museums
Press release from 05/08/2017
"museum4punkt0 - Digital strategies for the museum of the future" starts today. The Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz is involved with the sub-project "Explaining, understanding and participating in museum research".
The Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz (SMNG) is the second largest museum in the Senckenberg network. The museum's collections comprise around 6.5 million artefacts that document the development of living organisms in space and time and represent an archive of animate and inanimate nature. Its exhibitions invite visitors on a journey of discovery into the fascinating world of nature and convey current research content from the work of Senckenberg scientists. The SMNG also produces international travelling exhibitions with innovative media presentations.
As part of "museum4punkt0", the Senckenberg Museum für Naturkunde Görlitz will develop and utilise digital forms of communication in order to make modern research understandable to a broad public. A "virtual collection" will place the exhibition object selected by the curator pars pro toto in the context of many comparable objects and thus emphasise the importance of museum collections as research infrastructure. Citizen science projects aim to encourage citizens to participate in research into biological diversity and to get involved in science themselves.
In virtual reality or augmented reality formats, scientists explain their scientific work using an object in the exhibitions. In virtual reality offerings, habitats are "brought to life" that are otherwise inaccessible or cannot be experienced by humans, e.g. the pore spaces of the soil, the deep sea, rainforest canopies or early geological eras. Scientists accompany visitors in these virtual presentations, provide background information and present their working methods and results. Digital media will also be used to involve citizens: For example, citizens will help to record selected groups of soil animals by identifying them with digital tools and sending photos, including their location, to the newly developed Edaphobase soil animal database.