Beyond the Item

The bITEM project – short for ‘Beyond the Item – Biographies and Itineraries of Cultural Heritage Objects in Museums and beyond‘ – aims to present well-known museum objects in a state-of-the-art web application that is freely accessible online. The objects and their biographies are vividly described and, in addition to images and texts, 3D models as digital twins, timelines, and story maps are made available. Furthermore, the objects are presented with important actors in network visualizations. Object bibliographies thus become traceable and the journey of the exhibits to the museum is easy to understand. Within the project, data are digitised according to the FAIR principles and mapped using CIDOC CRM to be provided online. OpenAtlas is used as backend to acquire, edit and manage data. It is entirely built upon open source software. Research and development within the bITEM project at the Natural History Museum Vienna as well as at the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science is funded by the go!digital 3.0 program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (GD3.0_2021-17).