Sherd Project (Secure Heritage, Exhibition, Research and Didactics). Towards a DigiDactic Museum of the Aegean and Cypriote ceramic collection, University of Florence

Where Digitization meets Didactic: “DigiDactic Museum” creates a new border crossing, on which to build challenging exhibition platforms strongly oriented toward education and e-learning. New research trends and data capture procedures are currently spreading, with the aim of strengthening and updating potentialities and performances in museum collections exhibitions. Furthermore, advanced e-learning platforms are demonstrating as powerful tools with a clear appeal for students/visitors interested in these museums collections. SHERD aims to develop a new DigiDactic Museum project specifically addressed to the audience of students in Archaeology and Ancient History at University level. SHERD, presently under construction at the Aegean Laboratory of the SAGAS Department (University of Florence), is a complex new interactive museum exhibiting archaeological ceramic collections from Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus. As a whole, SHERD extends use and potentialities of didactic tools already active within the MUSINT Project, focusing upon a semi-specialized audience of students. While support materials will be made available (e.g. historical and archaeological overviews on specific topics, in-depth descriptive analyses of main aspects of the production technology), SHERD is conceived as an open filing system. Logged-in users will be able to contribute to the on-line collection catalogue, which will be a dynamically implemented system with free access. As already tested in several parallel cases (e.g. Ancient Cypriote Collection at the British Museum, London), logged-in visitors can use images for purposes of education, teaching, academic study and research, publishing images in a book, article, thesis or booklet, provided that the publication is non-commercial, and has an educational, scholarly or academic nature.