Virtual Teaching Collection

About

The Virtual Teaching Collection (VTC) project at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge within the University of Cambridge, led by Dr Robin Boast, ran from 1994 to 1997 and was part of the Teaching and Learning Technology Project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The VTC was an early innovative social computing project that developed a software program, Cabinet, which ran on Apple Macs and allowed users to create, develop, manage and comment on virtual museum collections. The project anticipated many of the current features of the social web and social computing.

The VTC was concerned with virtual objects. It was a collection of digital representations that may be used as a collection. The images did not pretend to be the objects, but were objects in their own right and, therefore, able to constitute a collection in their own right.

The goals of the VTC were twofold. First, to explore the range and potential of producing and using digital representations in their various forms; images, texts, hypertexts, video, sound, 3-D images and illustrations. Second, to construct a working digital museum that was meaningful to the way we work...