Technologies, standards and business models for the formation of virtual collections of 3D replicas of museum objects: The 3D-COFORM project

The paper will address issues related to 3D capture, documentation, storage and management of virtual replicas of museum objects for documentation purposes in view of their inclusion in Europeana. 3D cultural objects present a number of challenges concerning their management. The 3D-COFORM project will provide solutions aiming at making 3D documentation a common practice in the cultural heritage sector. This requires the definition of good practices for data acquisition and storage, together with the design of a novel documentation system for the acquisition and simplification procedures. In fact, these initial steps are often undocumented, and this makes the outcome unreliable for the strict criteria of heritage documentation. The following steps of storing, managing, searching and displaying 3D objects is still an uneasy process, and the project aims at providing state-of-the-art tools to improve the performance in all these stages. Finally, the project will address business processes, mainly through the design and start-up of a Virtual Competence Centre in order to provide guidance to cultural heritage institutions and practitioners wishing to incorporate 3D into their everyday practice.