Digitisation of Temporary Exhibitions: the Aldrovandi Case

Abstract

Temporary exhibitions in the cultural heritage system have become diffused. They are tools to enhance cultural heritage and to gather, in the same context, cultural goods that otherwise would never be exposed together. Their temporal limitation gives them the uniqueness of an event that will not be repeated. The exhibition ''The Other Renaissance: Ulisse Aldrovandi and the Wonders of the World'' was created to offer visitors a tour of an exceptional legacy of objects, some of which have never been exhibited before, combined with objects, works of art from several Italian museums, and digital installations that together tell the story of how the first generation of naturalists took their first steps into science as we know it today. To store this exhibition a photogrammetric and structured light scanner survey campaign was launched to acquire 3D objects. By leveraging a combination of 3D, LOD, and Semantic Web technologies, we propose to create a digital twin (intended as an aggregation of different information about real-world heritage objects) of Aldrovandi exhibitions, to create a new digital tool differentiated from the physical exhibition, but that could store all the information and objects exposed together physically.