At the core of the Infopoint platform are the Media Library and Cultural Heritage Database modules. Taken together, these two modules allow administrators to store and organize information about the various cultural items or locations under their care, as well as to maintain a single digital store of their various multimedia files.
The Cultural Heritage Database allows administrators to store, organize, and taxonomize information about:
Taken together, this allows any cultural or tourism institution, whether it be a small museum, art gallery, or the manager or a number of outdoor historical attractions, to manage all their data and media within a single centralised platform.
Information about the items and media objects stored in Infopoint is organized based on the Europeana Data Model, a standard developed by the Europeana project for defining metadata about cultural heritage items with the advice and guidance of technical experts from the library, museum, archive and audio-visual collection domains.
The Data Model allows users of the platform to richly describe the items and lcoations under their care, as well as to define meaningful relationships between them. Administrators of the Infopoint platform can define as little or as much information as they like about their records, and rapidly search through and filter their database to easily locate particular individual records they may be looking for.
Cultural and tourism insitutions typically need to maintain information about records in multiple different languages. The Infopoint platform gives administrators full control to select the languages that they need to work with, and store information about their records against each selected language.
The Infopoint platform aims to eliminate the need to duplicate data entry in multiple different platforms, by allowing you to manage a single database of records and media items that then feeds into multiple different channels of communications, each catering to a different audience.
Europeana is a European digital platform that provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help individuals find what they’re looking for. Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education and research.
Once you have inserted information about cultural items and locations under your care in the Infopoint records management module, you can then select to export that data as xml files structured for submission to any of the Europeana aggregators. Europeana Aggregators are organizations that work with cultural heritage institutions to gather authentic, trustworthy and robust data and make it accessible through Europeana.
Once available through Europeana, information about the cultural heritage items under your care will be available to the wider Europeana audience, and accessible to third party developers through the existing Europeana APIs and digital tools.
The Infopoint platform allows your to generate your own online digital portal exposing information about items from your Infopoint database to online visitors. As an administrator, you have full control over the items that you would like to make available through this digital portal.
The Infopoint portal is designed primarily to make detailed information accessible to researchers and other interested third-parties. Access to your portal can be made available through your own domain name, and linked to from within your own existing website.
The Infopoint plaform provides its own API allowing you to expose information from your Infopoint database to third-party software developers and services. This allows you to build your own third-party applications and systems that use the same data that you store in Infopoint, while continuing to manage your records in the same single Infopoint database.
Administrators in the platform can generate the necessary API keys needed by developers to access their Infopoint records, and maintain full control over which records to make accesible via the API.
Cultural institutions, whether museums, galleries, or administrators of historical and tourism locations, need to be able to engage with visitors directly within their space. Traditionally this has been achieved though the use of devices such as audio guides or mobile apps developed for visitors of the institution. Infopoint aims to provide simple and inexpensive means of engagement with visitors, while removing the need to re-enter information about cultural exhibits in multiple different platforms.
Once information about cultural exhibits and locations has been inserted into the Infopoint platform, the administrator is able to select to make that information accessible to third-parties via attractive, multilingual, online digital guides. These guides can be hosted and made available via a domain name owned by the institution, and both linked to via the institution's website, or made accesible directly within an institution via Infopoints or other devices.
Digital guides powered by the Infopoint platform are a rich means of engaging with your visitors. Some of the capabilities available are:
An infopoint is another name for the combination of a QRCode and NFC tag. You can generate the data for any number of Infopoints that point to any page from within the digital guides you have generated, and deploy them within your indoor or outdoor premises.
Visitors can interact with your deployed Infopoint using their own phone and be directed to information in the guide about whatever exhibit is located at the point at which the Infopoint is deployed. Visitors interact with the Infopoint through scanning the QR code with their phone camera, or by touching their phone on the Infopoint NFC tag.
Infopoints are simply the combination of a QR code and the data to be encoded in an NFC tag. The institution has full control over how to present this information within their premises - this can be in the form of simple labels, or printed on elaborately designed Infostands. Infopoints allow you to provide an inexpensive means of feeding rich information to visitors without having to purchase and maintain hardware devices such as audio guides or tablets, or having to develop a costly mobile app.
The digital guides generated by the Infopoint platform can also be made available via any standard device that has internet access, such as tablets or mobile phones. This can allow an Institution to deploy tablet stands within their space, or hand out devices from their reception, syncrhonized to their Infopoint digital guides and displaying relevant information to their visitors.
If you want to build and use your own mobile or digital apps, you can still maintain all your data and media in the Infopoint platform, and simply provide your third-party developers with access to that data using the Infopoint developer API.
In this way, the Infopoint platform allows institutions to simply maintain and update information about their records in a single central database, that then feeds into and updates all of their communication and engagement channels: online, in-premises, and via third-party applications and platforms.
Users in the Infopoint platform are able to form and manage their own 'teams' of users that all have access to the same data. This allows you to give access to your Infpoint account to multiple members of your institution, or join multiple teams each with their own internal set of records and data.
For example, this can allow the local institutions of a city to each have their own account and manage their own internal database of records, while also belonging to a common team where each insitution can select to share media assets and information relevant to all other local institutions.