An Inheritance Mode of Rural Cultural Heritage Based on Virtual Museum in China

In China, there is a crisis of rural cultural heritage inheritance due to urbanization. The traditional cultural inheritance modes such as building museums may not satisfy the needs of wide and fast culture transmission, communication, and inheritance. However, the virtual museum may provide new solutions. Nowadays, China has essential social-economic conditions for virtual museum construction but lacks sustainable modes for virtual museums supporting rural cultural heritage inheritance. In this study, we adopted the theoretical analysis method, expert argumentative method, and combined with virtual museum technology analysis to design an appropriate mode for the cultural heritage’s inheritance in rural areas. We built a demonstrational virtual museum for the Mt. Mogan government according to this mode, adopted a comparative analysis and questionnaire survey to verify, and assess the application effects of the mode. Results show that the inheritance mode of rural cultural heritage based on the virtual museum has advantages of larger exhibition scale and wider scope of cultural transmission and communication with less input, and this mode’s operation is steady and sustainable. The inheritance crisis of rural cultural heritage needs reasonable solutions, and our results can be a guideline for building virtual museums in rural areas to promote wide, fast, and sustainable cultural inheritance.

Scope and Features of Museum Setup Techniques in Oral Pathology

The preservation of pathological specimens has become very significant as it is a potential teaching tool and important source of data. Museum has been made compulsory in medical and dental schools by various countries as it is not a mere storage of old and rare specimens, but a vital learning aid in the field of medicine. The procedure of museum setup requires both scientific and technical skills. The term ‘Museum technology’ together constitutes the method of collection, preservation and storage of specimens. This article aims to review the basics in setting up a museum. Emerging advancements in museum techniques are also highlighted.

“To Recognize and Read Something as a Document...”: (The Transfer of Things in Research Reflections by G.L. Dain)

This article examines the cultural aspects of museum documentation as a process of identifying items to be preserved and actualized as historical documents. In the system of concepts of museum technology, it is designated as a selection process, from the point of view of museum philosophy — as implementation of the specific/museum’s attitude to reality. In the categories of cultural studies, the documentation can be considered as a subject-contextual transfer of things. This case’s formation can be now traced in the articles by J. Dolák, A.N. Balash, A.A. Nikonova, E.V. Abroskina.Basing on the analysis of published materials of the art historian G.L. Dain’s expedition diaries, the article considers the path of a thing to a museum. In addition to institutional factors, the range of her research setting includes the scientific credo of a scientist with a pronounced cultural discourse. This is “the study of toys in living connections with folk life and art, as part of the entire complex of children’s culture”, the knowledge of “the spiritual side of the mechanism of succession in folk culture”. On its basis, a corpus of individual field work methods is formed, relevant to the logic of the modern interpretive turn in the cultural sciences. Their initial message is the perception of a thing as a textual model of national culture, the setting on its multi-layer readability based on the idea of culture as a text. The article considers the subject-contextual transfer of things on the examples of acquiring the items of Bashkir, Chukchi, Eskimo and Buryat traditional cultures for museum collections. Special attention is paid to recreating things from memory by the bearers of the tradition. As a result, a conclusion is made about the five-component structure of the museum documentation process, which includes: cultural metareality — thing — document — object of museum value — museum object. The logic of transformations of things is concretized by the scheme of systematic cultural analysis: document — text — context — discourse — interpretation.

The Museum Maze in Oral Pathology Demystified—Part I

ABSTRACT Museum technologies provide a wide array of choice of museums to those who wish to exploit technology to attract, excite and ensure an unrivalled visitor experience, as well as capture and sustain share of mind and heart. Museum being a combination of both art and science requires skilled workmanship, meticulous planning and execution to exhibit a specimen to its optimal elegance due to its relatively smaller size and fragile nature. A well established oral pathology museum is rarely seen due to negligence of oral specimens, dearth of knowledge in this field and also available data on it. An insight on oral pathology museum, including its establishment, importance and advanced technologies to make it more simple and accessible are discussed in two parts. Part I emphasizes on basics in oral pathology museum, whereas part II highlights the specialized techniques and recent advances in museum technology. Our effort is to present this article as hands on experience for the pathologists, student population and the technicians. How to cite this article Patil S, Rao RS, Ganavi BS. The Museum Maze in Oral Pathology Demystified—Part I. J Contemp Dent Pract 2013;14(4):770-776.