Preparing Personalized Multimedia Presentations for a Mobile Museum Visitors' Guide - a Methodological Approach

Multimedia provides new opportunities for museums to enhance their visitors' experience. However, its use poses new challenges for presentation preparation, among which are: How to enrich the visit while not diverting the visitors' attention from the actual objects in the museum, which should remain the focus of the visit? How to provide a rich information space suitable for a wide variety of visitors? These challenges need to be addressed during planning and preparation of information presentations for mobile, multimedia museum visitors' guides. This work presents lessons learned about the preparation of multimedia presentations for museum visitors' guides in the course of the PEACH and PIL projects. While planning the presentations, the designers need to consider the exhibition as a whole, its objectives, its objects, and the information in which users may be interested. Then, in light of the resulting generic goals, elicit relevant text and images and combine them using cinematographic techniques into integrated multimedia presentations. All the above is abstracted in a nine-step multimedia presentation preparation framework, described in this paper.