Industry Government Company The National Heritage Board in Singapore is the agency overlooking five national museums and four heritage institutions in the island-state. Employees 350 IT staff 5 in-house plus 5 outsourced Annual IT Budget S$3 million-S$4 million (US$1.9 million-US$2.5 million)

The project was led by its chief information and technology officer, Philip Chua, who is also head of the organization's strategic technology office.

Upon learning that the NHB made it to ZDNet Asia's Smart50 list, Chua said he felt "great".

He added: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall any museum or heritage organization winning such an award--hence it is not only the first for NHB, but also for heritage organizations in the region".

NHB's IT master plan called for the development of an Integrated Museum and eArchival System (iMAS) which includes a system that consolidates information on the museums' collections.

Called the Integrated Museum Collections Management System (IMCMS), it serves curators, registrars, conservators and public programme executives at NHB, and handles in excess of 100,000 artifacts. Users can search and display artefact information. In the near future, users can even buy images online using credit and debit cards. The IMCMS also has an Application Service Provider (ASP) module that allows non-NHB museums to use it on a subscription basis.

Another system implemented as part of iMAS is the Integrated Museum Display System (IMDS). Phase I of the system comprised multimedia kiosks, and was piloted at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Empress Place. Visitors can use the interactive kiosks to guide their museum tours, retrieve a range of multimedia information, and provide on-line feedback.

Phase II of the IMDS project saw the introduction of PDAs (personal digital assistants) called the Museum eGuide (or MeG) which will complement the interactive kiosks. The MeG is currently being piloted at the Singapore Arts Museum.

Another project, the Singapore Cultural Resources OnLine (SCROL) involved the consolidation, meta-tagging, clean-up and indexing of the metadata to improve the data quality. The system can be trained to automatically categorize digital objects, and provide unified and contextual searches across disparate databases.

Many initiatives were put in place to ensure greater access to NHB's vast digital repositories, and to improve the reliability and security of its servers. These included relocating NHB's main servers to an Internet data center, consolidating its back-end servers into a storage area network and strengthening its network security.

Chua said NHB hopes to use share its IT experiences with other museums and heritage organizations in Singapore and around the region. "We can share the lessons learnt and, hopefully, promote a pan-Asean forum for museum IT and digital heritage," he added.