Virtual Museum of the Pacific pilot launched

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific was launched for community consultation at the “Access to Cultural Collections” seminar yesterday. Pacific Islander arts and community development representatives met at the Australian Museum to offer feedback on how they will use the website and whether it suits the Pacific Islander way of approaching navigation.

Australian Museum Director Frank Howarth opened the “Access to Cultural Collections” seminar by saying that the future of cultural institutions lay in ‘facilitating debate’ and ‘connecting with communities’. He stressed the importance of taking these objects back to their communities virtually. “The knowledge and power in these objects is immense”and they have the potential to enrich lives. The Museum has been collaborating with the Juvenile Justice Department to help make connections with cultural identity. Welfare workers were keen to take laptops into jails and community centres so that the Virtual Museum of the Pacific could help revive knowledge, skills and reconnect to cultural beliefs.


The interface of the Virtual Museum of the Pacific. Photographer: E Furno © Australian Museum

With the help of an Australian Research Council (ARC) linkage grant, the Australian Museum (Vinod Daniel, Melanie Van Olffen, Dion Peita) and University of Wollongong (Prof Amanda Lawson, Prof Peter Eklund, Prof Peter Goodall, Dr Brogan Bunt) started designing and building the website in December 2008. The first step was to build a prototype site displaying 427 of the Museum’s 60,000 objects in its Pacific Collection. They used high quality images and well-researched collection item descriptions.

It is well-known that museums are moving away from just displaying objects and are actively trying to capture people’s attention online. The Virtual Museum was designed so that the Australian Museum would use its traditional categories alongside user-generated tags, in different languages and specific to different regions. Information about the objects is available through a variety of mediums from catalogue descriptions and wiki annotations, to audio interviews, transcripts and video so that all of the ways a user communicates are met. Mr Howarth hopes in the future there will be the ability to search for objects using motifs or designs and move away from the reliance on language.


Detail of a record in the VMP of a Solomon Island comb with basic metadata and tags. Photographer: E Furno © Australian Museum

The biggest issue that came out of yesterday’s community consultation was the navigation of the website. Canberra academic Siosiua Lafitani descibed the Pacific view of space and time as circular – everything has a relationship. While the Western concept of space and time is linear. Hyerpace allows people to connect past and present knowledge remotely in a circular way but the design of the navigation tools would need to enable this.

Museums are finding themselves asking the eternal question: How can museums provide access to collections while respecting traditional owners and uses? How can the rights and needs of creators and preservers be balanced? Chief Marcellin Abong, from the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, reinforced that under Pacific Law both the object and the spirits associated with the objects need to be respected. In the complex traditional rights system used in the Pacific, copyright is paid with respect. Spiritual law would need to be understood before the consultation period is finished and more objects were uploaded onto the site.

Over the next three months there will be extensive community consultation and feedback before the project moves to the next phase of development. It is also starting to looking for future funding streams as the ARC grant finishes in December 2010.

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