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In 2023, the IT Department of the National Museum focused on the installation of audiovisual elements in the newly opened Children’s Museum exhibition and in eleven other exhibitions. In addition, we made progress on the deployment of the central collection system and worked on the development of the mobile application.
In April 2022, the National Museum launched a successful mobile app for mobile devices, The National Museum In Your Pocket, which will provide all visitors with a guided tour, offer navigation to the selected location or exhibit, as well as enable the convenient purchase of tickets. By the end of 2023, our mobile app has won several competitions, with three more awards added to the previous ones (Red Dot Award 2022, Golden Semicolon, Grand Prix Internet Effectiveness Award 2022): 1st place in the Public Procurement category in IMC Czech Awards 23, IDC FEA 2023: Best in the Future of Connectedness (with representation in Singapore) and 1st place in the Digital Transformation category of the WebTop100 competition.
The extensive and well-functioning indoor navigation, together with the implementation of markerless SLAM technology (the first project of this scale in Europe), contributed significantly to the great popularity of this mobile app, which was downloaded by more than 150,000 users by 2023. It currently has a rating of 4.8 stars (2,000 votes) on the App Store and 4.5 stars (790 votes) on Google Play. It works on 99.5% of current smartphones and tablets, and one in 4 users viewed the Fin Whale in AR (more than 50,000 times). Audio tracks played more than 300,000 times (1,800 hours of net time).
In the summer of 2023, a new exhibition Children’s Museum and 11 other exhibitions with audiovisual content were opened in close cooperation with the IT Department in various buildings of the National Museum.
We continue to deploy the highest quality operational standard in these premises, which allows us to monitor and reliably operate more than 350 AV stops ten hours a day, seven days a week. We use central control and signal distribution using Crestron NVX technology. We manage AV stop content using the Signage OS cloud system.
In 2023, we made great strides in digitising exhibitions using the proven Matterport technology, with a total of fifty exhibitions now available in the archive on this platform, enabling a virtual tour of these exhibitions similar to browsing Google Street view. Our goal is to systematically record and archive all exhibitions realized by the National Museum on the intranet and to make some of them, for which we manage to negotiate the appropriate licensing rights, available on the Museum’s website in the Virtual Exhibition Tours section.
During 2023, we also devoted considerable attention to the documentation and digitisation of our collections and work processes. Our teams carefully photographed the restoration work and collection items, allowing us to capture the details and nuances of each artifact. This effort has been supplemented by scanning materials for our upcoming exhibitions, ensuring that we have quality materials for our presentations and publications.
The Czech Museum of Music’s sound laboratory is equipped with historical and unique equipment for the preservation of sound media of all types of recording (mechanical, magnetic, optical). In the last five years, the laboratory has gradually been equipped with modern professional devices that can even salvage damaged media (the unique Endpoint device for digitizing phonographic cylinders or the special Saphir device for obtaining audio signals from broken phonograph records) and use or develop new methods and procedures in the context of applied research focused on the digitization and preservation of sound documents. This has created a completely unique workplace within Europe. At the same time, the laboratory specializes in photographing authentic images of recording media and their covers needed to obtain adequate metadata.
The eCollections project is one of the National Museum’s flagship digitisation systems, which is why we paid close attention to it in 2023. eCollections makes digitised collection items available not only from the National Museum but also from a number of other institutions, and currently offers 238,118 collection items from 201 memory institutions in the Czech Republic. As part of the NPO programme, we are intensively preparing a project for a new version of the eCollection portal, which will replace the existing system within two years.
In 2023, we continued to analyse the existing collection systems at the National Museum, preparing metadata and functional analyses that will form the basis for the tender for the new central collection system. We have completed a metadata and UX analysis, which we will use in programming the new version of this portal.
Based on the order of the IT Department of the National Museum, the Forensic Laboratory of CESNET performed penetration tests of the NM infrastructure in order to verify the security of the network environment against cyberattack. The penetration tests performed revealed a number of vulnerabilities in various categories, which were then systematically addressed. We initiated a review of the network architecture (network segmentation), enforced user account password reset and implemented multi-factor authentication across all possible accesses to the internal network, reviewed the procedures used to manage the Active Directory environment, and patched vulnerable web applications.
