The influence of information technologies on the availability of cultural heritage

Information technologies have offered new possibilities of the development of the market of tourist services and led to the creation of various client oriented information systems in the museum business. Museums have started to introduce information technologies in the sphere of accounting, storage and research into collections, to use multimedia, which include both traditional static visual information and dynamic information (such as speech, music, video footage and animation). TicketNet has helped greatly to attract more visitors. QR-codes revolutionized the museum business. Nowadays all museums have their own websites and experts believe that the number of virtual visitors will exceed the number of real ones in the near future. Therefore, scientists face a new problem of researching both negative and positive consequences of cultural heritage transfer into virtual reality. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.