The Director of the Istituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza, Galluzzi's remarks explore the failings of museums as educational institutions and explores the future of the web as a tool for recontextualizing the museum.

Today I'm going to try to talk about the topic of the Renaissance in this literal sense - it is a very important period of history as has been evoked by my predecessors, discussing Vigevano, Leonardo and Galileo. These people have been very important to the approach of creativity and innovation.

My topic will be about museums particularly, and cultural heritage in general. Since the mid 19th century when public museums were founded in Europe and North America, an enormous amount of literature has been developed regarding the fundamental educational role of museums - discussing the best means of helping the public to fully understand the meaning and the value of objects displayed in these institutions. Concern for the educational function of museums has grown enormously in the last decades and we have seen a dramatic increase in public access to museums as a consequence of global mass tourism.

One might say in general that museums have not succeeded in providing adequate facilities for learning. The emotional and mythical component of the museum experience has almost always overshadowed the educational dimension. Moreover, in the last decades museums everywhere have been urged to devote more attention to the improvement of their financial performance. As a consequence of this pressure the concern for learning and education has been attenuated in favor of marketing initiatives to involve private sponsors and solutions conceived to attract the highest possible number of visitors.

But there are other limitations that make it difficult for museums to provide effective educational services. The first problem lies with the public. Visitors generally believe that museums are sites to be visited for one or at most two hours, once in a lifetime. Obviously this is not the best condition for learning. Indeed, the largely dominating 'once in a lifetime model' is appropriate for experiencing a visual emotion, not for achieving full understanding of the value of a specific sector of cultural heritage.

The second problem lies with the trend that has characterized the historical evolution of museums. After their beginnings as promiscuous bodies, specifically the Wunderkammer model of 16th century, the development of the museum format is a story of ever growing specialization. First there is the separation of art collections from scientific collections that occurred during the enlightenment. Then we have the further process of specialization in art collections with the separation of paintings (the beginning of the pinacotecas) from sculpture, (sculpture galleries) from drawings (print and drawing rooms) and from minor arts (decorative arts departmenst).

The same process took place with regard to scientific collections. After their separation from art collections, specialization progressed through the division of mathematical and physical objects from natural history items. Moreover at the end of 19th century, under the impulse of the universal exhibition - the so called crystal palace effect - technological and industrial collection gave rise to new independent museums. Later on, new institutions devoted to the preservation and presentation of biomedical and ethno-anthropological collections were founded.

We have forgotten that museums are evolutionary entities - and at a certain point this evolution has been artificially stopped. This doesn't make great sense. This evolution has produced a fragmentation of documentation and cultural heritage according to disciplines: art, science, natural history, and so on but also to the various categories of objects - books (in libraries), documents (in archives), drawings and paintings (in art museums and so on) and also according to their different material support: canvas, marble, stone, paper, fabrics, timber, metal, etc.

This specialization process has placed all museums in a difficult position when it comes to making explicit to visitors the value of the collection they preserve. Objects presented in the museums are isolated and decontextualized making it almost impossible for visitors to grasp their real meaning and importance.

For the last fifteen years I've been testing the possibility of employing information technology to find a solution that makes a visit to a repository of unfamiliar objects of past science and technology a stimulating and fascinating experiencing for the average person. Although I have concentrated on the history of science and on museums that preserve scientific heritage, I'm sure that these experiences hold value for all kinds of museums. These reflections have guided the radical revision of the communications strategies of the Florentine Institute and Museum of the History of Science with an innovative conception of the nature and the role of the digital library and of the virtual museums. This has played a crucial role in the goal of re-contextualizing the museum.

With the virtual museum, the outcome of our effort is a multimedia catalogue. We're observing a few aspects of very complex systems, both on and offline that covers the entire museum collection of over three thousand items. It offers users the possibility to recontextualize individual objects to make them work virtually, to find information about their makers and patrons, to access related informations stored in different containers and so on.

Thanks to this system visitors can freely build their visit strategy according to their preferred topics, their curiosity about specific personages, instruments and periods. Thus the rigid structure of the real museum as conceived by curators can be deconstructed by users. Visitors can freely assemble items according to their logic, interest, intellectual agenda and profile. Moreover they are no longer confined to the perimeter of the physical museum - it becomes possible to travel beyond its walls, accessing items distributed in different containers throughout the world.

This model is a telling example of how the virtual museum should be conceived. Not as a digital clone real museum, but as a totally different structure. A dimension where you can reverse the process of specialization and decontextualization that has marked the evolution of these kinds of institutions until today. In my opinion, this is the best way to enhance the educational potential of museums.

The same vision has inspired our initiatives in the digital library domain, where we have pursued the goal of building a "hybrid" repository as a semantically integrated archive, populated by a variety of digital representations of objects that in the real world are preserved in different containers. The outcome of this effort is the Galileothec. You are looking at some of the sides of this huge application. An integrated repository that hold the complete collection of Galilelaen web resources - easy to explore, thanks to refined instruments of research. It integrates the digital representation of texts, images, manuscripts, documents, museum items, bibliographic records, digital borne information, chronological data, a lexicon of Galileo's works and subject indices. Galileothec also embraces catalogues of objects and experiments and research tools concerned every aspect of the life, the culture and activites, and the reception of the intellectual adventure of the Pisan scientist. Finally it includes a digital representation in full text of the entire corpus of Galileo's work.

A characteristic that is particular to Galileothec is that the user, while looking at or querying any of these different archives, can immediately verify and control whether or not there are related documents in any of the other repositories and can navigate between these with great rapidity. These applications, and many others already published on our website, are tailored for the best exploitation on the part of users to invite them to interact with the content.

The active interaction of users with web content is an extremely interesting phenomenon, a recent phenomenon. It has enormous potential for upgrading the quality of the published information - the links established by users between contents disseminated on the web can help respond to the demand for semantic integration of information that is not adequately met by today's search engines.

These are the paradigms that currently inspire our work and the upgrading of the work done so far. We intend to follow the rapidly moving borderline of the interactive web - foreseeing in it the promising territory where the demand for a stronger educational function of museums and libraries in the digital domain can be satisfied.