“Mobile Guide of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve” was presented!

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29 January 2018

In 2017, the project “Mobile Guide of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve” became a winner in the nomination “Museum for Tourist” of the Seventh Grant Contest “Museums of the Russian North” held by PAO Severstal. It gave a chance to start to develop the multimedia application. It already operates at present!

Presentation of the multimedia application “Mobile Guide of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve” took place in the conference hall of the museum on December 15. A.I. Smirnov, head of this project, told about the work on the museum computerization that began in the early 2000s and the digital development strategy. Development of an own mobile application became a logical continuation of this work.

A.I. Smirnov, head of the Department of Information Technologies in the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve, told about the idea of the multimedia application, “Several years ago we began to think of a necessity to make such a product for the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum. Having noticed that most of people came to us with tablet computers and smart phones using them only as cameras, we decided to “make” visitors to come to the museum using their own hardware. The museum website is adapted for mobile devices, but there is no free Wi-Fi on the grounds and the quality of cellular communications is inconstant. Only MTS and Megafon support LTE, but they don’t provide the widest channel. Besides, in spite of all efforts of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, roaming within Russia hasn’t been cancelled. Not all people add options for travelling and therefore both Russian and foreign tourists prefer to be offline on the grounds of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve – a small number of check-ins shows it. So it is impossible to invite a mobile user to the museum website that contains a lot of information and texts. We also decided that it was inefficient to make a separate mobile website – you need absolutely different content for it. Moreover, taking into account that the total area of the museum is 12 hectares and there are over 40 architectural monuments on its grounds and the navigation system is far from perfect, mobile devices could get us an opportunity to orient visitors and to give them adapted information about the monuments, exhibitions, news, to show them the museum collections, to tell them about services and in general to invite them to visit the museum.

In 2017, the project “Mobile Guide of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve” became a winner in the nomination “Museum for Tourist” of the Seventh Grant Contest “Museums of the Russian North” held by PAO Severstal. It gave a chance to start to develop the application”.

First of all, we held an opinion poll in the social networking sites that showed visitors’ interest in such a product.

The contracting organization was chosen already when we made an application for the contest – the LLC “Multimedia Solutions Laboratory” (Maugry) that approved itself in mobile application development. Its specialists have developed a wonderful application for the Kunstkamera and recently for the Armoury Chamber of the Moscow Kremlin Museums.

“Our budget didn’t impress them, but as I understood the application of Kirillov itself was interesting for the company – it was to be very simple and to have very interesting points at the same time. We destroyed lots of copies together with the colleagues already when discussing the application structure when we wanted everything at once. But they pulled us up showing the size – who would download the application that was larger than 100 megabytes, and reminding of the budget – nobody would work free of charge. As a result, we have developed the application that contains only basic information and the additional one (such as video, extra pictures and panoramas) can be downloaded in use. Besides, we have provided wide possibilities for further development and modification in the application architecture beforehand”, said

A.I. Smirnov at the presentation of the multimedia application “Mobile Guide of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve”.

At present there is a Wi-Fi access point in the Kazan Tower. The application is being tested. It will be presented to the wide public in Vologda in the first quarter of 2018. The museum employees will inform everybody how you will be able to learn about any architectural monument of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum-Reserve, history of the monastery, its founder, to test your knowledge in a specially elaborated game and to get a personal audio guide using the application “Mobile Guide”.

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