Towards an Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit

6 December 2011

The Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit is almost there! December is not just a month of holidays, gathering with friends and family, and spending some much deserved free time. December is also the month in which we will be getting the Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit ready for its first phase of testing.

During the past months we have built a virtual exhibition that brings together the research results of the Making Europe book series, the collections of some of the finest European Science and Technology museums as well as the digital library Europeana. The collections of our partners will not only feature as static content in the exhibit, but also as related content next to the stories. Currently, we have twenty-four stories ready to go! Together the collections and the stories will give the visitor a wealth of new insights on Europe’s history.

What is more, we have invented some exciting interactive features for our visitors. For instance, visitors will be able to create their own tour through the site’s many embedded and related objects.  A tour is a personal exhibit story in which visitors can share their insights in combination with a free selection of objects from the static and related content. Besides that, visitors will be able to add personal notes to their tours and join discussions in our online community. Making Europe researchers and representatives of our partner institutions will be invited to create special ‘curator’ tours that offer visitors fresh new perspectives on the objects we have assembled.

With these features we hope to provide an exhibition that draws the attention of technology experts and enthusiasts across the world, as well as policy makers, museum visitors, and you, the research community. We also hope the exhibition will function as an interactive and inspiring tool for education in universities and hopefully in secondary schools as well. Imagine giving a lecture based around the rich material of the exhibit. Imagine designing assignments for students to complete in our rich online environment. Imagine students in different countries like Poland, Portugal, and Norway doing the same assignment at the same time and discussing topics in the online Inventing Europe community!   

We are nearing the end of the year, and we are nearing the end of what we call the VE1.0. Starting in January, we will begin testing the site - and for that we will need your help! We will approach several of you to help us test the workability of the site. We hope that you will be willing to help us turning the Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit into an international success story.

The New Year brings with it a new phase in the development of the Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit. We will be improving the functionality of the site, we will add another twelve stories, and we will start with the development and employment of the site for education purposes.

Great things are coming up, and we will be keeping you informed on the VE2.0.

What remains is wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year

Alec, Alan, Brian, Slawomir & Suzanne

We thank our sponsors Eindhoven University of Technology, the Foundation for the History of Technology, Next Generation Infrastructures, Imperial College London, SNS Reaal Fonds, and the European Science Foundations for making everything possible. We also thank our partners for their support and enthusiastic collaboration during the past year: the Deutsches Museum; the Documentationzentrum Alltagskultur der DDR; Europeana; the Hungarian Museum for Science, Technology and Transport; Museum Boerhaave; Museum Centre Vapriikki, Tampere; the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision; Science Center NEMO; Science Museum London; Tropical Research Institute of Portugal.