In this tech-powered era, Chinese cultural relics are getting a digital makeover.

The Shanghai Jiaotong University has established a "Digitization Cultural Relic Promotion Base" to explore the potential opportunities and challenges of working on tangible and intangible cultural heritage in a digital context. The university invited museums, research centers, academic institutions, government departments and media to create a network and a platform for digital cultural relics.

Bringing ancient artifacts into the modern age has been in the making for decades, with history museums around the world digitizing the information of their wealth of antiquities and plugging them into virtual infrastructures in an attempt to preserve them.

The Taipei Palace Museum has been digitizing artifacts since 2001, said Dr. Lin Quo-Ping, director of the museum's department of Cultural Creativity and Marketing. Their efforts initially included databases, interactive kiosks, films and electronic publications, and later deepened into licensing image files to private sectors and vendors for commercial design. Licensing under their brand name opened the doors for cooperation with the private sector to come up with designs and distribution channels that the museum could not achieve alone.

"The cultural creative industry is a new trend that can help museums create new kinds of gifts, merchandise, and marketing channels to earn money, which can be used later on for artifacts conservation. We can even buy artifacts on the market and so on," said Lin.

But digital archiving is not a one-stop solution for the digitization of cultural relics. The metadata standards of digital cultural relics include various factors, such as VRA Core, CDWA, CIMI and REACH, which can in turn be divided into six models – cultural relics' basic information, portion information, related history and culture context information, related visual documentation information, exhibition information and cataloging information. Shanghai Jiaotong University researchers applied 3D technology to digitize cultural relics and ancient Chinese paintings to bring an aspect of the traditional Chinese culture to modern visitors.

"Cultural relics are the best base point for worldwide cultural communication. Our work here is to explore the stories behind the relics and spread them through digital technologies to the furthest corners of the world, in order to share the Chinese culture with the world and enhance our cultural influence," Professor Tong Yanqing said.