The Museum of Da Nang, a not-to-miss place if you are in the city, last year welcomed a total of 275,571 visitors, of whom  240,911 were foreigner, surpassing nearly 38% of the year’s target. This positive sign was mainly attributed to innovations created by the museum’s staff in an effort to attract even more visitors from both home and abroad.

Visitors accessing information on the city’s intangible cultural heritages

Last year saw the reasonable rearrangement of exhibition spaces inside the museum, including areas displaying Da Nang’s prehistoric times, the culture of ethnic groups in the city, and its traditional agriculture.

Mr Vetsica Heidrich, an Australian visitor, expressed his deep impression on the exhibition space here as he could imagine how the natives lived and worked in the past.

In order to create a rich and impressive collection, the museum’s staff have taken the trouble to collect more exhibits in remote areas.

For example, during their March 2016 field trip to Tra Kieng Commune, Bac Tra My District, Quang Nam Province, the museum’s staff collected a set of lithophone consisting of pieces of rock which are struck to produce musical notes.

The musical instrument is owned by Mr Le Xuan Dieu, a Cor ethnic group man. 

Ms Ngo Thi Bich Van, the museum’s Deputy Director, added, in the burgeoning fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), the application of digital technologies into the museum’s operation has been enhanced considerably.

Since September 2018, the Quick Response (QR) codes - square, checkered symbols that can be scanned with smartphones- have been put into use at the museum.

The museum has proved highly effective in making its exhibits more interactive, and enhancing the visitor experience by melding the worlds of entertainment and education.

Using their smartphones, the visitor only needs to have a free QR Code scanning app and access to the Internet.

QR codes were positioned on the labels of exhibits on display at the museum, hereby serving to improve visitor’s ability to quickly and easily pull up extended information about a total of 600 exhibits on display at the museum in Vietnamese, English, and French just by scanning QR codes with their own smartphones.

A QR code can hold even more videos, data, pictures, audio or combination of presentation media.

The audio guide will add Korean and Chinese language options later this year. 

More recently, a cultural heritage databank has made its debut at the museum, featuring a total of 3,368 exhibits on the city’s intangible cultural heritages.

In detail, they are 248 narratives, 3,043 photos, 64 documentary films, and 13 recordings, plus some documents on the intangible cultural heritages of Viet Nam’s ethnic groups.

Included are the Stone Arts Sculpture of the Non Nuoc craft village, ‘Tuong Xu Quang’ (Quang Nam classical drama) and Fish Worshipping Festival, and the UNESCO-recognised ‘Bai Choi’ (singing while acting as playing cards).

The databank is open 2 days a week, Tuesday and Thursday.

The opening of the databank aims at promoting the application of information technology in the collection, storage and preservation of the city’s cultural heritage value, and further introducing the public to tangible and intangible cultural heritages of Da Nang, and those of Viet Nam as a whole.

Mr Le Tan Thanh Tung, the Deputy General Director of the city-based Vitours, highly appreciated the launching of the multi-lingual audio guide and the databank.

Recent times have seen an upward trend in the number of travellers who take tours in a self-sufficient way, rather than pre-arranged packages.

Moreover, due to growing foreign visitor arrivals to the city, it is necessary to develop such a multi-lingual guide system.