Development and Evaluation of a Digital Museum of a National Intangible Cultural Heritage from China

Abstract

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) such as traditional craftsmanship lacks a physical form and often originates from minority groups with little documentation. Digital technologies can be leveraged for documenting and archiving these assets of humanity. In particular, digital museums are established for promoting public understanding and appreciation of cultural heritage. Despite the richness of ICH in China, the development of digital museums of ICH is still in an early stage and mostly from government endeavours. As part of an inter-disciplinary collaborative project involving academic researchers, information professionals, and a private not-for-profit museum, this paper described the development of Gifts from Lanmama, a digital museum of Miao embroidery as a unique ICH from Guizhou ethnic minorities in China. This paper also reported a preliminary evaluation of the digital museum with 78 users, in terms of its usability and affordance for learning about cultural heritage. Results revealed the strengths of the digital museum in terms of the rigor of metadata and its impact on improving users’ understanding and appreciation of Miao embroidery. Some issues and challenges were also identified, such as the lack of channels for user-system communication. These evaluation results offer insights for further improving the digital museum and other end-user oriented digital presentations of similar ICH.