The project was required to design once and to implement by steps, established in the actual condition of Shanghai Museum and used the famous international museums' information management technology for reference. Considering the system's progressiveness, practicability, security, reliability and its easy operation, we targeted at digital museum developing with information service as backbone, to build an advanced and appropriate network environment and database.

A museum website with bright individuality and distinguishing feature had been built on Internet at the first half year of 2001, which adopted new techniques of advanced Storage Area Network (SAN), shelved web servers centralized management, and Internet image search etc. Readers can browse the history and culture treasure on the web, and at the same time, with the advanced world levels' devices such as film scanner HR500 and Plasmon DVD-base, by system integrating on multimedia data flow through acquisition, storage, organization, creation, management and application, a huge multimedia database was established inside the museum, providing management and retrieving depending on content.

On the aspect of collection information management, we will adopt data warehouse technology to store and integrate the hierarchical, diversified and huge collection data on a united database platform, and lay a foundation for international culture and museum information center.

A variety of methods are provided for publishing of multiform information on the website of Shanghai Museum, including two-dimensional image and text publishing, three-dimensional and audio/video data publishing as well as publishing of web page from other museums, to show the broad and deep collection of Shanghai Museum to the world, and to let the world know the Chinese famous ancient art. Additionally, full-text retrieving method is provided for the disseminated typical expositive text data; meanwhile the functions such as the Internet message board, user on-line register are reserved. Especially for three-dimensional and audio/video data publishing, three-dimensional scanner will be introduced. Besides, audio/video data, two-dimensional image, text, virtual scenes and three-dimensional objects will be merged into an organic whole via network technologies and multimedia technologies to form a virtual museum on Internet. It brings visitors on Internet the relative knowledge as well as the enjoyment of strong feeling for movement.

In order to construct a digital museum of leading position both in China and in the world, Shanghai Museum intends to take full use of all kinds of searching and retrieving tools for digital construction, including the image assistant searching software and the full-text and image mixed retrieving system developed by FineGold, to establish a free-classification multimedia information center inside Shanghai Museum.