Abstract:

Educational curators in university museums, libraries, and archives can adopt their curatorial works, which include identifying specimens, practicing ethical object handling, and building digital archiving systems, to provide students with object-based learning opportunities . Object-based learning is a method of experiential learning that imparts collections and objects into the learning environment. The term objects involves not only natural history specimens and archaeological relics, and traditional artworks but also digital images and artifacts. Since object-based learning is objective as a rethink of its benefits in cross-disciplinary learning in the higher education sector, including at university museums and libraries, and archives, objects have been offered for pedagogical use in cross-disciplinary learning in the diverse fields of sciences, humanities, and social sciences.

Today, digital technologies are imparted in cultural or academic institutions, including university museums, libraries, and archives, to gain learning, enjoyment, and accessibility. They are employed into diverse museum settings such as virtual museums, allowing collections and objects to be accessed beyond the museum physical walls, at any site across the world wherever the Internet available. Whereas in the past, virtual museums could be installed in only a few museums because of the difficulty of computer programming methods required, the emerging advancement of digital technologies has facilitated the work of digitizing objectives and made it easier to deploy virtual museums featuring virtual reality, or augmented reality.

Significantly, the benefit of digital technologies has yielded to enhance learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, object-based learning with digital technologies has been carried out around the field of digital humanities in several universities. On the other hands, few studies have offered digital object-based learning in Japan yet. Recently, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) can widely offer lots of images and audio/visual resources. This digital archiving system is powered by Omeka S, an image server, and equipped stability, rapidity, and lightweight. It performs to have extremely high-resolution images with captions for the metadata of objects on the Omeka S.

The study was designed to practice digital object-based learning for agriculture and life science students in the University of Tokyo. Resources for digital object-based learning were offered from the digital archives both at the University of Tokyo Library system and University Library for Agricultural and Life Sciences virtually. Some of them are exhibited as exhibition panels both in the Agricultural and Life Sciences Museum and University Library for Agricultural and Life Sciences. The digital archive contains many rare books and artworks related to agriculture. Most of these objects have been obtained, collected, and curated within the University Library for Agricultural and Life Sciences of the University of Tokyo as Agri. Library, UTokyo Collection. Sasō kazu, a Japanese lily book of Japanese native flowers published during the Taishō era in 1919–1920, were adopted from their digital archives. Now the author is preparing resources into digital object-based learning associating with several courses and find whether digital object-based learning gains student interest and learning efficacy in virtual museum settings.

Keywords:

Object-based learning, university museums, university libraries, digital archives.