The modification of the project brought new requirements and
new challenges to surpass. We were all worried because the time
to finish the project was reduced in great lenght [medida], but
with a lot of entusiasm to reach the goals we proposed to
ourselves.
One of the points we had to deal with, was directly related with
the main advantage of the project, as it was made of several
museums, we should make the group as coherent as possible, in the
style as well as in the type of included informatio in all the
pages. To help ourselves in the organization we defined the
amount and type of information for each museum, and a format to
name the files, we reorganized too the tasks each member of the
team had to do.
Back to Table of Contents
It was proposed to create a page including a summary of the
logbook and to put in several links, which could take the visitor
to updates, and extensions of the information or the logbook
itself. Each one of these subpages would have more information
about each topic.
Back to Table of Contents
We received Mrs. Nelly Decarolis from Argentina, who is the
secretary of the ICOFOM-LAM (Museology Comitee from the
International Council of Museums in Latinamerica), We showed her
the pages that we already have, she was very interested in
everything we developed. We also received the visit of Mr.
Guillermo Andrade, and Mr. Hector Rivero Borrell General Director
of the Franz Mayer Museum, they were very pleased and impressed
about the work we have done.
Other museum interested on the WebMuseum project was the
Nishizawa Workshop-Museum, located in Toluca City, Mexico, they
thougt it was a good and interesting idea to have information
about their museum in Internet, they gave us a book about the
history of the museum, and explanations about their collections.
Back to Table of Contents
The transcription of the information from the Barquisimeto
Museum was finished, and we began the translation. Normally, the
texts and/or documents writen by and for the museums have a very
particular style, because of this we had some difficulties with
the translation, about some terms and with the style in general.
We have been doing the internal links between the different files
and museums, and we began the serch of external links to other
museums or places with related information.
Back to Table of Contents
Obviously we wanted to include images in all museums, but as
we could not visit all of them personally, we saw some videos.
One was from Coro City, Venezuela and the other one was from the
National Museum of the Mexico Viceroyalty. We check them to get
some ideas of the type of images that can be used for the graphic
identity, and to include on the Coro Museum page. It was also
necessary to choose a type of images which could cover the
different museums presented, thus it was suggested to use icons
of the Colonial period, which has a wide range of images and it
includes many of the museums or their collections.
It was suggested to write capital letters at the beginning of the
paragraphs of the different pages of the museums, as well as the
use of an antique map on the preface page. Many images were also
showed in order to be used in the iconography of the project.
Back to Table of Contents
We tested a program called Worldview, a viewer of VRML for
Windows (the one we got was an Alfa version), and as it was an 32
bits application it required the use of Win32 (version 1.25 or
higher). One of the important characteristics of the program is
that it can generate anchors in some objects, in the similar way
as in the links of the HTML for paragraphs and images.
Back to Table of Contents
One of the members of the group attended at the general
conference of the ICOM (International Council of Museums), which
was held in Stavanger, Norway. She took information of the Franz
Mayer (Mexico), Coro (Venezuela) and Barquisimeto (Venezuela)
museums, the Mosaic and the Win32 in order to install them at the
computer that will be used in the conference presentation. After
one week, when she came back, she told us what happened during
the conference: she mention that everyone liked what she took,
and what she showed from Internet, specially all the
Latinoamerican representatives who saw the WebMuseum project
becoming a reality.
Back to Table of Contents
One month before the official presentation of the WebMuseum of
Latinoamerica in SIGGRAPH 95, we started a fine tuning. The
writing and the style of the different documents was gone over,
some typographical mistakes were corrected. In general, the
dimension of the images was adjusted and some other things were
corrected.
Some documents from the Franz Mayer Museum and the Ethnologic
Museum of the Amazonas Federal Territory were checked and
corrected.
The graphic identity design advance was checked. The graphic
interface of the museums was checked, adjusting the position of
the images, as well as the colors thet were used.
Two programs were tested, one of them is the WCVT2POV, a graphic
program which has the posibility of translating 3DSTUDIO files
(Autodesk) into the VRML format, and the other one is the final
beta version of the NSCA Mosaic 2.0, that includes several
characteristics considered in the last revisions of the HTML.
Some conversion tests were made from 3DS into VRML and they were
checked in the Worldview program. As part of these tests, it was
designed a draft of the Barquisimeto Museum in 3DS in order to
convert it into the VRML. Although the "navigation" is
a little hard to do, after seeing the result on the Worldview
program, it looks quite well.
At these tenseness days, we received good news, Silicon Graphics
would provide us an Indigo Extreme 2 equipment to use it in our
stand for the presentation of the project.
Back to Table of Contents
The final idea for the main page (or cover page) of the
WebMuseum was to show a graphic menu with the appearance of a
colonial facade or a kind of cabinet, se we made several tests to
use tables to show the images that we would use.
We made a page with information that would act as a link and give
sense to the museums as well as to the project, this page was
located as the Introduction Hall of the WebMuseum.
We checked the last version of the pages of the museums, the
cover page (or entrance) is an antique map, pressing any point of
the map, will transfer the user to the "Table of
contents", which shows three frames, with three images each,
when you press on any of them it links to the correspondent
museum. The new version of the 3D menu for the WebMuseum is made
in VRML, besides we add several anchors in it to link the
different files.
We transcribed the bibliography and references used in the
project.
We selected new images for the files of the Convents of Morelos
State and for the Introduction Hall.
Back to Table of Contents