Guillaume
Waline, ODA EDITIONS, France
This presentation is
based on the experience acquired during the realization of the
website Louvre.edu.
The
project Louvre.edu came to light in 1999. It is a website edited by
Oda (part of the “Groupe France Télécom”) and
the Louvre Museum. The Louvre Museum contribution to the project
consisted of the educational resources (mainly texts) and the
copyright for the artworks, Oda Edition is editing, producing the
website and is in charge of the webmastering. The website is
sponsored by the French Ministry for Education.
Starting
from the beginning the website was designed to be an online teaching
support for college students (14 – 18 years old) and their
teachers, but it is not restricted to teachers and students, it is
opened to all subscribers. The subscription gives the right to print
and use all the downloadable material for educational purposes. Each
school has 30 access codes for teachers and a code that can be used
by all the students, but it does not give access to the Desktop.
The experiment started with 300 schools in 1999, to see if the
project was. Nearly 1200 schools will be connected by the end of
March 2000.
Louvre.edu is divided
in three domains, plus a personalized space:
The
Museum (a virtual trip in the museum using HotMedia
technology) explains the relation between the artwork and the museum.
The
Collections (presentation of the main artworks from the different
sections of the Louvre Museum), it consists of an index (by author,
title and keywords)
The
Library (that gives access to an art history encyclopedia and
dictionaries) is the place where you can find texts about history and
art history thus linking the artifact to its historical and cultural
background
And
the Desktop where each user can select and download resources
(only images and texts), use chat rooms. It is the heart of the
project. The material can be given to the students by teachers as
documents to illustrate a lecture, or more interesting to build their
own webpages.
The aim was to give
access to a database of artworks through the educational resources
the Louvre Museum could provide. The users have different ways of
reaching the artworks and each one will present different aspects of
the object.
Due to the specificity of the users (teenagers and their teachers)
it was decided to create a multimedia environment that could easily
become familiar to them. We tried to have the same interactivity as
offline products, but available online. To do so we avoided hypertext
links as they are in a way misleading (even though very useful in
normal context), the amount of data available being so huge that the
user would get lost if he could wander freely in the website. It was
decided to use Flash 4 to create a dynamic user’s interface and
animations designed to give the possibility of horizontal navigation
(between the different domains) and vertical navigation (inside a
domain) in the website. Even though the handling of the user’s
interface is not straightforward, once you have learned it suits
perfectly the aim of the project: to give access to huge database
through a logical and educational structure of the data
Often
students tend to consider that museums are boring, but it is so
because they are unfamiliar with the artworks and their background.
One of the main advantages of information technologies is that they
are canceling the distances, both physical and cultural, between the
museums and the visitors. An online museum is an opportunity given to
anybody who has access to Internet, to visit this museum. Thanks to
Louvre.edu students get to know the artworks, how it was created, its
history. In doing so the gap between the student and the object is
lessened. A trip to a museum will not be a boring afternoon you have
spent with your school, in a place where there are strange artifacts
that you do not understand.
Now
the media available on the site is considerable: there are 3000
artworks, 1000 commentaries (both spoken and animated) over 1000
written documents. Oda edition is building an atlas based on
interactive maps. They are thought as an introduction to some of the
collections: the Italian paintings, the French paintings, the
Egyptian antiquities etc. The idea is to explain the link between the
history of the civilization that produced this art and the artworks.
Presentazione
Programma
Segreteria organizzativa
FAST-Federazione delle
associazioni scientifiche e tecniche
Piazzale R. Morandi 2
20121 Milano
tel: 02.76015672
fax: 02.782485
e-mail: esperanto@fast.mi.it
