Opened in 1936, the National Village Museum "Dimitrie Gusti" was only the second open-air enthographic museum in Europe. Following this trait, as a leader of innovation, in 2010 the museum decided to start a process of digitalizing all of its assets. Among them, over 80.000 cultural items, and all of the 272 authentic peasent farms and houses gathered from all over Romania and present in the museum.

One of the museums main requests was to reproduce these farms and houses in the best possible digital quality so that they could be preserved and made available for future use.

Indexing and archiving more then 80.000 items was also needed, but even more important was acessing them in an intuitive and proficent manner, another problem to which we had to produce a solution.

Creating a strong online presence, communicating with its visitors, and an online shop, selling authentic Romanian goods were a request.

Last, but not least, a solution to stream the weekly events that take place at the museum was needed. One that could be also afordable for the client but that could also provide the best video quality for the end-user.

A foundation for the web platform was needed, one that could scale and that could offer the best prices for our client. That's why we directed our attention to Windows Azure and to the CMS solutions that were available for that platform. From this point, Orchard CMS, was the smart choice to make, as it was designed to work in the cloud and because it offered the best options for customizing and developing new addons.

Recreating the level of detail that a visitor of the museum might benefit from was a difficult challange, but with the use of Deep Zoom technology and Photosynth we where able to create 360 degrees panoramas, presenting each farm or house from different angles and perspectives.

An affordable streaming solution, that would present the user with an adaptive stream and that could scale to any number of users was needed. We leveraged what the open source community had to offer in the name of Azlivestreaming, an open-source project built for the Azure platform and that us offered exactly what we needed, adaptive streaming in the form of IIS Smooth Streaming and a architecture that could scale based on the Azure platform.

The project is still under development but the foundations are good, and we are hoping to develop in the next months something that would innovate and would create a new dimension to the open-air museums from all around the world.