Two members of the Open Museum Project and the BCDH (Edouard Grigowski and Carlos Pallan Gayol) were featured in the program of the 14th Annual Meeting for University Collections: Collections in Motion at the main building of the University of Bonn's campus. The first event took place on Thursday, October 5th in the Feast and Senate Hall at ca. 15 Uhr, in the context of the "Object Lessons" block and entailed an interactive presentation entitled "From object to 3D model: new digital opportunities to enhance the presentation of a collection exhibit". The project members demonstrated how to transition from a physical exhibit object to 3D models and virtual renderings to further engage the public with the collections using new technologies such as 3D photogrammetry, Augmented Reality (AR), and 3D printing. It featured an original exhibition object from the Bonner Amerikas-Sammlung (BASA-Museum), displayed alongside a 3D photogrammetric model of the object (produced by the BCDH and available at its digital SketchFab repository), together with an Augmented Reality (AR) version of the artifact that participants could view in their own mobile devices (through a QR code provided) to 3D-printed replicas of the object at different scales and surface textures that were exhibited side-by-side with the original. The session took place in a highly interactive modality, allowing for a rich exchange of ideas with the event's participants, about the object and related aspects, such as the implementation of the digital infrastructure that allows for these new modalities of presentation.
The following day (October 6th at 15:45 hs), a further participation took place with Workshop 2, entitled "Old data in a new guise: Lessons learned from the relocation of the Bonn Collection Databases". On it, Grigowski and Pallan shared their insights and experiences resulting from the thorough joint evaluation processes started since August 2022 to refurbish the digital infrastructure underlying several university museums at collections from the University of Bonn's holdings, which included data migration from a semantic database system into a relational one, as well as the implementation of the open-source Content Management System Directus. Through an interactive format that included real-time surveys allowing to visualize and comment on the survey results with the participants. The workshop benefited from the engaged contributions of several participants who possessed considerable experience working with museum collections and multimedia data management resources and a lively exchange of ideas ensued between the presenters and the participants, ranging from database migration and data management strategies to the new possibilities that content management systems (CMS) offer for digitizing museum collections and assets and disseminating them to a broader range of user communities and stakeholders.
