Abstracts:

Murom Historical and Art Museum and Cooperation of the Lower Oka Museums - New Decisions in New Conditions

The year of 2003 has passed for us without the grant financing, so in the sphere of informatisation we’ve gone on working at and renewing the previous projects.
1. The sites www.museum.murom.ru and www.oklandia.murom.ru were transferred on the new platform XOOPS. XOOPS is a dynamic OO (Object Oriented) portal based on the open source code and written in PHP. Nowadays the sites work as a database at mySQL. XOOPS is free to redistribute, use and modify. The platform permits to register users giving them various statuses from ordinary user to web-master. The users are free to leave their news and private messages, which are placed on the site after some edition. Besides the users can open their subject forums. We built into the new platform the full contents of the previous site in the form of a floating frame. The possibility of the distant stocking of the museum reserves database has been maintained. XOOPS supports a number of services such as searching the site, convenient statistics, calendar, etc.
So the information portal, announced in 2002, has been technically realized, but we again faced the problem of information replenishment of the portal. The lack of finance for the informatisation development of the museums-members of the Cooperation stopped the process started in 2002. Besides the present day infrastructure of small towns as itself does not allow the free use of Internet (out-of-date telephone lines and stations). As a result 80-90% of Internet in Russia is concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The edition of the previously issued products on CD-R has been launched in Murom Museum, such as presentation of “Traveling Around Oklandia”, electronic version of the textbook “History of Murom and Murom Region from the Ancient Times till the 21st century”, and the CD “Murom in Engravings. Unforgotten Names”, worked out by A.R. Komlev and State Scientific-Research Institute-Museum of Architecture named after А.V. Stchusev. The previously developed products are transferred into new formats, started as exe-files. Small editions are produced using ordinary CD-ReWritable and jet printer. After selling the CDs a small new batch is made. It is convenient as it doesn’t demand large one-moment investments.
The Murom Museum experience gained in 2003 shows that information technologies can be used in small museums with the minimum financing of this activity.