Museums and the Web

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TourML: An Emerging Specification for Museum Mobile Experiences

Robert Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Nancy Proctor, Smithsonian Institution, USA

http://code.google.com/tap-tours

Abstract

In addition to launching a successful tour, how can museum professionals ensure that the content we create will outlive the technology and vendors we select today? A successful metadata standard for mobile tours would provide a number of advantages for museums. A mobile standard would allow museums to migrate the content and structure of a tour among the variety of tools available today and tools that may be available in the future. Similarly, a mobile standard would allow the same tour to be used on a number of current and future mobile devices. In addition, museums could choose authoring tools which best fit their staff and workflow needs while still deploying to whatever mobile device is best for their content – even if these tools are provided by different vendors. Perhaps most important, a successful mobile standard would ensure that museum content outlives any particular technology we use today.

Keywords: mobile content, content strategy, sustainability, specifications, content management systems, schemas