New computer technologies to document and valorize museum cultural heritage

Museums are now facing ICT in the framework of a contradictory relationship that seems to be much more suffered than promoted. This relationship is not the result of open and farsighted strategical choices of museums, but it often is an inescapable consequence of the fact that ICT are changing the historical and cultural context within which such institutions work.What makes the home page of a museum web site different from other institutions or bodies, even from non-cultural ones? In this sense catalogue databases are fundamental, they represent key elements to the identity of the museum cultural heritage, even irrespective of the fundamental aspects of completeness and scientific control and far from the articulation of interfaces for research and presentation available to the public.