Cataloguing and Accessibility of Cultural Heritage

The first network among the Italian University Museums of thirteen Universities (Bari , Cagliari, Chieti-Pescara, Ferrara, Florence, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Parma, Perugia, Rome “La Sapienza”, Salento, Naple II, Siena, Tuscia) has been recently approved and financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research for a project of scientific cultural heritage valorization through the use of multimedia technologies. The project is under the coordination of the University of Modena and the patronage of UMAC University Museums and Collections International Committe of ICOM. The final target will be a bilingual web portal realized, on purpose for the project, in an innovative perspective considering the peculiar features of the different University Museums collections, the experiences of each, their interdisciplinary characterization and the possible uses in a contemporary historical, social and cultural context. The first step is to monitor the cultural heritage of the thirteen University Museums, in order to complete the already existing databases and align them to catalogue standards released by the Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation of the Italian Ministry of the Culture within the General Informative System for Cataloguing SIGECWeb. By these catalogue systems it will possible to design and implement four main common thematic cultural itineraries through the museums of the participating Universities about stories, landscape, stories of scientific instruments, starting from museums premises and their scientific collections, which could be also included in touristic itineraries. In order to spread them new multimedia technologies will be applied to be used both on-site and on-line within the web portal, websites, through mobile devices and for editorial initiatives. These technologies will allow to create cultural communication programs that involve the emotional and sensorial spheres, by adopting different educational strategies, for general audience as well as for students of different kinds and levels of schools.