Abstract:

Innovation has a cost. It is often the case that museums trying to innovate, simply cannot afford what it takes to build truly memorable exhibitions. Lack of human resources and high-tech equipment makes it hard to create quality contents that could be shown to the general public. Nevertheless, universities’ museums are usually embedded in an environment that has the potential to provide all the tools and human resources required. The only thing needed is to establish a proper strategy and an interaction facilitator platform - U.OpenLab - which enables creating, building and sharing knowledge about the museums’ collections and the academic population. This will make it easier to distribute the aforementioned knowledge to the general public, in a truly sustainable, systematic, integrated and articulated manner.

In this paper we are going to present the U.Porto OpenLab prototype that is being built as the stepping stone of this project, providing students with learning in a project environment.

Keywords:

U.OpenLab, Museum, public general knowledge, archive, platform, prototype, digital, resources, project.