Museums get one foot into the future |14 May 2013

They also have interactive display windows where visitors may only press a button to see an object either clearly or at all, or to hear the sounds it makes in real life. This is especially so at the Natural History Museum (NHM) where a person pressing a button for example hears the sounds produced by species of birds shown in pictures or models.

The director of national museums Cecile Kalebi said this in an interview with Nation yesterday as Seychelles plans to mark International Museum Day – which falls on Saturday – with exhibitions to be hosted on Saturday at the Revolution Avenue-based NHM and the National Cultural Centre at the National Library.
The day will be marked under the theme: Museums (memory + creativity) = social change.

She said the museum are also using more dioramas to illustrate objects, for example models showing how Victoria was before the 1862 landslide which expanded the town at the cost of many human lives.

“We are getting the support of more partners like businesses, banks and tourism establishments to mount extra interactive information technology devices like dioramas,” she said.
Dioramas are near life-size three-dimensional models, sometimes enclosed in glass showcases.
The word diorama originated in 1823 to mean a type of picture-viewing device.

The word literally means "through that which is seen", from the Greek di- "through" + orama "that which is seen, a sight".
These days it is used to simply mean a small-scale replica of a scene.

Global bodies spearheading the day’s events say the richness of our historical heritage, preserved and displayed by museums, together with the inventiveness and vitality that have characterised the museum sector’s action in recent years, are where the strength of museums lies today.

“Reconciling their traditional mission of conservation with the creativity necessary for their revival and the development of their audiences – this is the evolution that museums are trying to undertake, with the strong belief that their presence and actions can transform society constructively,” they say on the website.

“This truly optimistic theme in the form of an equation dynamically gathers several concepts that are essential to defining what a museum is today, highlighting the universal nature of those institutions and their positive influence on society. It summarises the complexity of museum tasks and recalls that they are meant to contribute to community development and gathering together.