Outreach Through New Technology

The CMC forged ahead in 1994-95 towards becoming a museum "without walls", a museum for the global village. Tapping into new communications technologies, the Museum saw considerable progress in making its assets available to audiences throughout Canada and around the world.

Strategic alliances with two major partners -- Digital Equipment of Canada and Kodak Canada -- helped the Museum extend its electronic outreach. These alliances have linked the vast technical capacity of these private-sector partners with the storehouse of assets held by the Museum. Achievements include the following:

The staff of Kalmara Inc., a Kodak Imaging Services Company, continued the work of capturing images and creating digital formats for the Museum's collections of artifacts and photographs. During the first year of production, the target of digitizing 60,000 images was surpassed, with the scanning of 65,460 images. This is but one phase of the Digitization Project, during which the Museum expects to gain greater electronic control of, and access to: 4 million objects; 700,000 photographs; 15,000 audio recordings; 7,280 film and video sequences; and its paper-based archival collections;
Digitized material from the CMC storehouse could eventually be used in a wide array of electronic outreach products -- from CD-ROMs and Photo CDs, to data packaged for Information Highway networks. To explore this potential more fully, the CMC and its partners have launched a "think tank" project called DigiMuse. This project examines how the Museum could create marketable multimedia products, and identifies the technical, business and organizational requirements which would make such production feasible;
Staff finished digitally recording the Children's Museum's permanent collection, as part of a multimedia databank. With this task complete, staff will now be able to focus on using electronic media such as CD-ROM to reach out to a wider audience;
This year, the CMC and Digital reached an agreement to establish a National Multimedia Institute on Museum premises -- one of six that Digital is setting up around the world. Digital and its partners are investing $15 million, and the CMC is providing accommodation for the Institute, which will include:

Research and development laboratories;
A resource centre;
A public testing and demonstration area called The Sandbox;
Create services, ranging from design to multimedia processing and development;
Archive services as well as distribution services through various elements of the Information Highway.

In addition to helping the CMC develop electronic products, the Institute will serve other clients in order to generate revenue for the partners.
The CMC was able to make its digitized products and information available internationally this year by becoming a World Wide Web (WWW) site, joining about 70 other museums on the network. Through the Web, users can find out about the Museum's history, exhibitions, programmes and public services. They can take interactive tours of the galleries, see overviews of collections and tap into a "cyberboutique" offering mail-order publications and products. During its first three full months of operation, the site received over 200,000 accesses from some 10,000 client sites on the Internet. The information currently available, in French and English, is roughly equivalent to a 350-page book. Offerings will grow as both the CMC and the Multimedia Institute make contributions.
Specific products created during the year included an interactive CD-ROM on totem poles. Work was also underway on four compact disk portfolios: Back the Attack: Canadian Women and the Second World War, Painting the War: Canada's Second World War Official Artists, Maya, and Tsimshian: From Time Immemorial.
The CMC can take pride in other electronic outreach achievements this year, namely:

A partnership with the Charles R. Bronfman Foundation to produce and market a major new product known as Canadian Heritage Interactive Multimedia Information Kiosks (CHIMIKs). These touch-activated kiosks tell heritage stories through a blend of text, photos, videos and audio material. A prototype kiosk was installed in the Museum last year. This year, the technology was offered to 100 institutions through a limited direct-mail campaign, resulting in 11 orders from institutions in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories;
Participation in an international project coordinated through a museum consortium called CIMI (the consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information). The project aims to make museum databases easier to use by recommending and implementing standard access systems and procedures;
Development of the local area network (LAN) continued, linking virtually all CMC and CWM employees to a sophisticated telecommunications system. This will give employees immediate access to digitized products as they become available, and will enhance productivity greatly. Staff will be able to access research material without leaving their desks; similarly, clients will have access to databases from their personal computers.

All of these developments show some of the potential to be realized from the 1,000-kilometre fibre optic and cable network incorporated into the Museum during its construction. The possibilities are endless.

Table of Contents