MULTIDISCIPLINARY TECHNOLOGIES FOR CREATING VIRTUAL MUSEUMS - A CASE OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM DEVELOPMENT

Creating virtual museums and sharing their collections online is a very important form of bringing cultural heritage to a wide audience. It is a form of society education. With the development of information technology, including 3D scanning, for the acquisition of information on material artifacts and their visualisation at the customer end, virtual museums are becoming ever more realistic. More and more museums move information about their collections into digital space. This process is multi-faceted and requires knowledge and skills from many different disciplines. It therefore entails the cooperation of teams of diverse and multidisciplinary competences. The article presents the areas of expertise needed to create a virtual museum. These are: education, history, multimedia, and digital technology. Contemporary information technology presents tools used to create virtual museums, especially digital 3D technologies. The study presents in detail the project undertaken by two universities, one from Europe and one from Central Asia. The aim of the project is to create a virtual archaeological museum presenting in the Internet the archaeological artefacts of the city of Samarkand and their historical context and educational aspect. An important role in the study is played by 3D technologies, which serve to build digital models of real objects. The methodology of these activities and its technology stack are presented in detail. The article also shows the positive and negative aspects of cooperation between teams from both universities.