Research and development within the bITEM project, funded by the go!digital 3.0 program of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is carried out by a team led by Viola Winkler and Roland Filzwieser at the Natural History Museum Vienna as well as at the Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science of the University of Vienna. The ACDH acts as a cooperation partner.

bITEM – short for Beyond the Item – Biographies and Itineraries of Cultural Heritage Objects in Museums and beyond aims to present well-known museum objects in a state-of-the-art web application. The objects and their biographies are vividly described and, in addition to images and texts, 3D models, timelines, and story maps are made available. Furthermore, the objects are presented with important actors in network visualizations. Object biographies thus become traceable and the journey of the exhibits to the museum is easy to understand.

Within the project, data are digitized according to the FAIR principles and mapped using CIDOC CRM to be provided online. OpenAtlas, hosted by the ACDH, is used as backend to acquire, edit and manage data. It is entirely built upon open source.