Virtual exhibition: a return to the past

Abstract

Exhibitions have become increasingly important for libraries and many of them consider exhibition activity as part of their core business. Digitisation and the digital transformation phase have further reinforced this trend. Virtual exhibitions can compensate for many of the disadvantages that traditional exhibitions had, and at the same time offer all the advantages related to the Internet: they can be viewed and visited anywhere in the world and at any time, they have significantly lower costs with regard to the problems of transferring, and securing for transfer, the authentic works to be exhibited, and they tend to be and potentially permanent exhibitions. Examples of virtual exhibitions include the bavarikon portal, which has been developed and operated by the State Library of Bavaria for almost 10 years with increasing success. In this case we are faced with a return to the common origins of libraries and museums and at the same time with the emergence of a new form of cultural transmission, based on images, figures, iconic representations, i.e. what has been called the iconic turn for some years now.

Keywords

• bibliographic exhibitions
• virtual exhibitions
• bavarikon