Overview
The Corporate Community Relations project with the State Hermitage Museum was launched in June 1997, and provides an important opportunity for IBM to demonstrate its technology leadership in partnership with a world class institution, and will be used by business management as a reference site for key international customers especially in the emerging markets.
The project has four components:
- Image Creation Studio - based on IBM Research's Pro/3000 Scanner with PC's and special image processing software, which produce high quality, high resolution digital images from originals or transparencies of works of art from the Hermitage collections.
- Education and Technology Center - includes seven PC's installed near the entrance to the Museum featuring three, image-based curricula in both Russian (Cyrillic) and English for children and the public.
- Visitor Information Kiosks (4) - located at the two entrances to the Museum and at two other locations, they provide Museum visitors with dynamic, multi-media navigational tools and information on the Museum based on scanned images from the collection. They are in both English and Russian (Cyrillic) and will include six pre-selected tours, special exhibition and event information, Museum highlights and news, and the option for visitors to map out customized tours to particular art objects, collections, or halls and receive a printout to guide them. The kiosks are PC's equipped with touchscreen monitors. The Java-based software created by the Haifa Research Labs is the first to use Java technology in an IBM kiosk application.
The kiosk technology includes a KDEA (Kiosk Data Entry Application) that serves as a front end to the kiosk's database. The KDEA allows the Hermitage to continuously update the kiosk information on their own. New content for collection highlights or exhibition information can be entered at any time, making the kiosk a dynamic and informative resource.
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for a slide show.
- Digital Library Supported Web Site - based on RS/6000 computers and IBM Digital Library software from the Santa Teresa Lab. The special application software for the Hermitage web site was developed in Naples, Italy and the design and user interface of the web site was created by Interactive Media in Atlanta. The new dynamic Hermitage Museum web site (hermitagemuseum.org) is in both English and Russian and includes all of the static content on the existing Hermitage site. The site features a searchable database of high resolution images from 12 different categories of works of art (painting, sculpture, jewelry, etc.), PanoramIX images of selected halls and artworks, QBIC Search (Query By Image Content), and a newly developed "Zoom View" Java-based technology created by the IBM Haifa Research Lab (located in Israel) especially for this project. It enables the viewer to zoom in on a specific part of an image for detailed analysis and to read descriptive material at the same time.