Transcending and expanding the walls of the museum: digital pivot, digital by default, digital transformation

Daniel Pett (Historic England)

Cite as: Pett, D. (2022) Transcending the walls of the museum. A digital revolution? in Oxford Handbook of Museums (Stevenson, A. (ed)) Oxford University Press

March 17, 2021

🥪🥪🥪 36 mins read

Abstract - this is a preprint version

This paper will discuss how digital technology, methods, theory and practice could transcend the physical limitations of museum and archaeological spaces. The museum digital experience is founded on its collections and subsequently the physical location, staff and brand - this paper will consider how the digital realm can bring to life the collections and narratives for audiences on and off site. It will not be exhaustive, the panoply of digital experiences is beyond the space and scope of this handbook and without doubt, important aspects will be overlooked.

It will discuss how low-cost, reproducible technology could be used to enable multi-vocality, democratic co-creative tools and platforms, immersive experiences and new ways of working which can transcend the digital divide. Within this volume, this paper will undoubtedly become the most dated of those included due to the rate of technological change and the pace platform attrition and churn.

1. Introduction

At the time of writing, the world is going through a large period of uncertainty, the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way that museums interface with digital activities. Have all been successful, no. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Writing this paper without access to a physical library has made this paper, a digital focused paper, drawn mainly from digital sources (mostly openly available), and this is indicative of how the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector will move forward - digitally driven.

The Internet and its associated technologies have dramatically changed the way that museums and memory institutions engage with their audiences since they first went online in the late 90s (Keene 1996; Keene 1998; Bowen 2010, Gaia et al 2020). Since those first steps, when hand coded HTML, FTP deployed, frame based interfaces were defacto, interface design has evolved and museums have embraced technology to deliver richer, more meaningful experiences for their audiences.

Over the next few years, this rate of change and democratisation of access will not diminish (and has been predicted and discussed- see Besser 2019; Kenderdine 2013, Kidd 2018), as new technologies, techniques, concepts and experiences are developed to enrich those shared moments of public wonder and the role of the museum adapts to the digital space. Therefore, from the start of this chapter, let us make it very clear, technology is like the tide that King Canute commanded to stop in that well known apocryphal anecdote recorded by Henry of Huntingdon (Forester 1853:199). It simply will not pause, stop or bend to your command. Your innovation will be overtaken far faster than that beloved paper-mache diorama commissioned in the early 20th century.

The world is seeing the creation of new museums with digital technologies embedded from their inception (for example the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney) or as they are gutted and refreshed (for example the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne). Retrofitting digital experiences into the building many of us inhabit, neoclassical Victorian museum buildings can severely limit the outputs one can implement - thick walls, listed status, lack of wiring conduits, and the presence of asbestos can hamper roll-out.

Likewise, if you have suboptimal management processes or physical experiences within the museum space and you add a digital ingredient, you will still end up with a broken process or experience if you have not fixed the foundations. Information and communications technology (ICT) is not a panacea for any form of business, it is a tool that underpins modern working practices and experiences and can provide a slick veneer if done well.

At the heart of this chapter, a theme will develop, questioning whether a large majority of museum digital is a marketing exercise or whether it should be a far richer method of engagement with disparate public audiences, providing meaningful experiences. As a digitally trained archaeologist and humanities scholar, I hope that one sees the latter of these potential characteristics as the one to aspire to, but without visitors to interact with your resources, your digital outputs are without value. This piece leans heavily on the Anglophone world, but most of the concepts discussed can be used globally - all areas of the world can experience digital poverty, can harness similar technologies and the common denominator is the connected world via the Internet (whether it is snail paced or hyper connected.)

Often one hears the academic, the curator, the researcher, bemoaning the lack of exposure their product gets from their communications and marketing colleagues - without visually engaging, unique and appealing subject matter your battle will be lost. Therefore as part of this handbook, maybe some of the ideas discussed below will help your project or institution on the digital pathways to viral exposure.

In the face of the Global Covid-19 Pandemic, a digital revolution in cultural institutions may be brewing, as technology and its use begins to mature; technology is becoming part of an emotional and sensual response to the human condition and how we interact with our shared past. Museums are facing assaults on their own history (sometimes from within their own ranks; for example the work of Dan Hicks (2020) on collections of Benin Materials) - the questions of Black Lives Matter, of neutrality, of decolonisation of collecting practices and of other global events such as the Arab Spring and the resurgence of Nationalism and state interest in the past- which tease challenges out beyond the museum’s physical walls and create a space for global discourse.

However, are institutions actually stuck in a cycle of lessons that have not been learned? The new UK “Towards a National Collection'' funding programme, is this a rehash of the Museum Libraries and Archives drives towards digital collaboration of the early 2000 period? Have we learnt lessons from projects such as Culture 24’s Let’s Get Real programme? (Finnis et al 2011; Malde & Finnis 2017) Or are we just repeating these cycles and losing sector knowledge? Fundamentally, museum digital experiences are grounded and built upon the richness of their documentation (a key pillar of the accreditation process in the UK) and the reason why the public and the academy beat a path to their doors.

However, it is what museums do with these data that tells the narrative of the institution, the collection, the people and the communities that they serve. Ultimately, digital engagement, methods, and practice in this time of global unrest are very much tied to ‘emotional labour’ (Frost 2020); uncertainty about where we are going, what the future holds and how we can harness these tools, deal with the disruptive nature of these technologies, discover and resource capacity for delivery, increase the availability of skills and move away from reactionary delivery.

1.1 The information superhighway?

Regularly in print, I have returned to a paper written by Tim Schadla-Hall in 1996 where he asked a timeless question: “how ready is our collections information for the information superhighway? I suspect the answer is that a lot of it is not ready for the mud track or even the occasionally trodden grassy path!” Whether this statement still stands true, is something that many will return to regularly. To be fit for purpose and to provide your digital fundations, collections information needs cleaning, standardisation, disambiguating, updating and tending to maintain its usefulness to audiences, funders, participants and the machine led computer world that is burgeoning in Artificial Intelligence (Museums Association 2020).

Feedback mechanisms with researchers, the public and machines aid this process and we now have powerful tools from citizen science to assist with this process. A quarter of a century after he committed these words to the written page, all is not bleak. In 2018, the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in the ‘Culture is Digital’ report (DCMS 2018) published a figure that 61% of the UK’s cultural institutions had digitised and documented up to 50% of their collections - but to what degree of granular precision? Did all records meet minimum documentation standards (Spectrum 5 in the UK); how many games of smoke and mirrors have been deployed to weave this figure?

1.2 The digital divide/digital poverty line

The issue of the ‘digital divide’ or ‘digital poverty’ (Frost 2020; Mihelj 2019; Office for National Statistics 2019, Malde et al 2018), is becoming apparent at scale within the museum sector (globally), and has accelerated during the pandemic; with many differing, but interlinked facets - literacy, access, connectivity, skills and investment. Those without access to the Internet are now disadvantaged to varying degrees - simple things like booking tickets, doctor’s appointments and application processes are accelerating towards the digital experience.

The divide is not only between hyper-connected and poorly-connected continents, countries, regions and communities but between institutions on a local and national scale. In the recent past, the divide focused squarely on connectivity and access to technological hardware and software but it is evolving to interfaces, ethical considerations, digital censorship, funding streams and access to training to deliver.

This divide extends to access to digital skills, to grants for digital activity, to access to technological partners, to accessing high quality digital implementation, to having senior leadership who believe in the potential of digital activity. (Malde et al 2019)

Digital technology is a great enabler, but also a leveller, with ambition and desires often outweighing the physical capacity of organisational capability. Throughout this paper, the digital divide will be bubbling away, just under the surface of all things that are discussed. If you’re commissioning or building a project around digital technology consider the following constraints:

  1. Can your audience connect easily to your intervention - if the project requires mobile signal can you provide this? If people are in areas with low bandwidth capabilities can they ever connect?
  2. Does the intervention require high end equipment, can your audience or indeed the institution afford to use it?
  3. Could the equipment preclude some people from using it? Disabilities, motion sickness, phobias could all stop some members of your audience from enjoying the experience.

Addressing these issues can be difficult for institutions on a budget, or where technical knowledge is low. Institutions could produce low bandwidth, accessible websites for consumption of key resources - optimised and compressed images, localised content delivery networks; or in the case of physical displays when bring your own device precludes people from joining in (may be because the participant has no device, or is unwilling to download an app or pay for bandwidth) devices could be made available (for example the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Cupid and Psyche Augmented Reality (Cooper & Noble 2020, Pescarmona 2020) or the British Museum’s Virtual Pilgrimage (Uglow et al 2017) where they were built into exhibition design.

When planning these interventions, at the back of the mind is that burning question - ‘is a digital solution actually needed to convey meaning or enhance the experience?’ Quite often it may not be - a simple example of analogue Augmented Reality can illustrate this from the Heiden Tor (Heathen’s Gate) at the Petronell-Carnuntum archaeological park where an etched glass panel[1] is used to enrich the view of the ruined Roman construction.

2. Digital foundations**

In many institutions, technologists are now a fixture of the available human resource within Museums, but they are often working in small teams or alone, with very few institutions able to afford multi-disciplinary teams to enable digital content to be produced at scale. Institutions are grappling with how to resource digital functions, where to situate them and how they fit with the mission of the organisations (James & Price 2018).

Many factors can influence the formation of digital capability within cultural institutions, without exhausting these, a list is produced below.

  1. Technical staff - team size, production and maintenance skills, how your level of financial compensation affects retention, technology stack that they are comfortable with.
  2. Non-technical staff - willingness to learn new skills, adaptability in the face of disruptive technologies, rate of change that they can accommodate.
  3. Relationships - Complex technological relationships within the organisation; are the management and staff willing to engage in digital transformation processes or will change derail structures? Does the institution have an appetite for risk, for experimentation, for possible failure? All of these can have a significant impact on digital projects.
  4. Financial foundations - can the institution afford to invest? Can it afford a cycle of iterative improvement?
  5. Planning prowess - digital projects need rigorous planning, without this failure is more often than not the end result. Having those that execute the project, manage the project places undue stress on the end result. Follow a project management methodology and recruit project management specialists.
  6. Evaluatory frameworks - your projects and products must build in longitudinal evaluation to enable lessons to be learned, for strategy to be influenced. Make use of digital analytical tools to provide data for informed decisions so that you can follow the DKIM pyramid (see below).
  7. Connectivity - The hyper-connected museum can deliver high bandwidth digital experiences, whereas the low bandwidth museum may struggle to serve up email or provision computers for its staff. Internal networks, external connection to a service provider, mobile signal coverage (3G/4G/5G) and WiFI all impact significantly on what an institution could deliver for its audiences and staff.
  8. External relationships - for example, does your institution have a development/fundraising agreement in place that precludes using certain competitors technology. Would Samsung want you to implement hardware from Sony in a venue they sponsor?
  9. Branding and identity - has your institution got a strong visual appeal and a logo that commands attention? Can it provide an instantly recognisable presence, which makes it easy to transfer from print to digital?

2.1 Digital transformation: where are we going?

The seven digital pivots defined by Deloitte (Gurumurphy & Schatsky 2019) within their digital maturity model can be seen in many institutional and funding body digital strategies, with perhaps pillars 6 & 7 being the ones of most importance at this time - a unified customer experience, coupled with business model adaptability. Multiple toolkits and evaluation frameworks are available for use within digital projects, for example the ‘Balanced Value Impact Model’ (Tanner 2012)

As the museum world becomes more astute about marketing its digital and analogue presence, one will hear digital strategies based on variations of the three R model (see Nielsen nd. for example) which could be expanded to the 6 R model; or the use of frameworks such as the ‘brand resonance pyramid’ (Keller 2009:144). These R factors might include these terms, and all will have actors within the audience that place greater importance on their R factor over the others. In these global times of uncertainty, revenue will become the one that many boards, directors and senior management teams will focus on:

  1. Reach: total number of unique users who consume your content.
  2. Revenue: the income that can be attributed to digital activities
  3. Relevance: how the institution creates content that impacts on current affairs, one’s emotional state, etc
  4. Reaction: the way that the content you produce produces a stimulus for reactive activity, can a social media intervention be converted beyond a like to a membership or donation?
  5. Retention: whether your audience returns for more interactions with your content and programming after their initial contact.
  6. Relationships: institutional bonds, produced from the reaction to visiting, to the ties created by sponsorship deals etc.

Those institutions that can service their customers and adapt rapidly to change in these constrained times will survive, but few museums have achieved this so far - in 2017 the British Museum tendered for a big data pipeline platform[2] just before their digital unit was dismantled and this project was never realised. Working towards the Data > Insight > Knowledge > Wisdom (DIKM) hierarchical model (see Ackfoff 1989; Rowley 2007)

The digital medium can provide the means for a small rural history museum such as the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading (Marshall 2020) to become global social media museum superstars, due to the risk taking of their social media lead, Adam Koszary (formerly of the Bodleian, Tesla and now working at the Royal Academy), and his eccentric use of a photo of a large sheep (the Absolute Unit[3]) on Twitter (2018). As he often says in his lectures on social media, his director took notice of the power of social media when the MERL reached the news pages of the Times of London (Pett 2018).

It can provide a platform for global delivery of cultural arts events such as the live broadcast from Epidaurus’ magnificent theatre of Aeschylus’ Persians[4] or the National Gallery’s tour of its Artemisia exhibition[5] with its curator Letizia Treves, the now closed Augmented Reality showcase Verizon sponsored Metropolitan Museum’s - The Met Unframed (Metropolitan Museum 2021), or the much anticipated Royal Shakespeare Company’s Virtual Reality experience - Dream (RSC 2021).

The pandemic has seen a surge of these digital interventions, an amplification of signals amongst an amorphous noise of digital programming. As museums closed their doors and shuttered their windows, a rush to deliver content was launched. Did we see delivery of quantity of product versus quality of product? Much of this programming was being done pre-pandemic in digital format(for example Vikings Live from the British Museum[6]) or in physical meeting rooms and theatres - but the volume of experiences being offered has increased.

We now have a panoply of interventions being offered over the video conferencing platform of your choice (Zoom, Google Meet, Teams) which includes lectures, private tours, round tables, question and answer sessions, workshops; podcasts, short films, long films, social media driven event; the list goes on. We are also seeing institutions again dabbling with paywalled content and the freemium model of content delivery in an attempt to retain their membership base - a concept that was famously trialled by the Brooklyn Museum of Art with its 1st Fans initiative (Reagan 2009; Xiao 2012).

As we see organisations turn to these media, the grounding question must be asked: what sets out ‘your’ experience as being truly unique? Institutions had varied outputs, delivered experiences that missed the point, had expectations of higher engagement, whilst some sat back and bided their time to deliver new digital foundations and subsequently quality programming. Often, one will see a cultural institution building a new digital product and hoping that the audience will come in droves, however a famous quote “build it and they will come, it’s not a strategy, it’s a prayer” Blank (2006:7) sums up many of these endeavours. Thorough audience research and careful platform choice or reliance on a digital ‘venue’ becomes key to your venture. Build where your audience is, build where your audience wants to be, build where your audience might go next and build novel but meaningful experiences that draw your visitor in.

3. Building the digital museum

An institution that will successfully navigate the digital swamp needs several tools in place to function effectively. For the sake of this article, let us imagine that your institution is a venue that charges for admission (see for discussion on the (de)merits of charging). An non-exhaustive overview of what might be considered fundamental building blocks of an expanded digital presence for a museum, or memory institution to prepare its offer to go beyond the walls of the estate are laid out in table 2. This table attempts to align the facet and reasoning to the R factors mentioned above.

Digital facet Reasoning Main R factor(s)
Strong visual identity (including colour palettes, logos, labels, design elements) and branding guidelines Brand awareness, patron recognition, enables the creation of eye catching visual designs Reach Revenue Retention Resonance
Semantic domain name A domain name that reflects the institution and is memorable, easy to use on marketing materials Reach Retention
High quality photography Impressive aesthetic images of your collection or venue will give your user an insight into an experience that they want to be part of. Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships
Digital strategy A strategic vision is perhaps most vital of the building blocks of your digital presence. It must underpin everything you do in the virtual space that the museum inhabits and be built on interoperable standards to enable upgrade/data exchange. Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships Relevance
Coherent and unified web presence Often museums develop a family of websites over time that have no coherent branding or common platform for delivery and maintenance. Your digital strategy should outline how to mitigate this and sunset or archive legacy systems when necessary. Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships Relevance
Back of house collections system The collection is the bedrock of your digital presence. Without documentation - visual and written - the museum cannot present narratives or rich visitor experiences. Relevance Resonance Reach (long tail)
Public Collections Interface (sometimes called an Online Public Access Catalogue - OPAC) Building on the back of the house system, the public wants to view what your institution stores. With a good public offering of this information, much of your battle to provide a rich experience will be won. Reach Resonance Relevance
Ticketing or events management system Due to the global situation, the need for ticketing systems has been pushed to the forefront of most museum management’s mind. These systems need to be low friction to integrate and easy to use for the consumer. This is one of the drivers of the 3 R model referred to above - with the opportunity to build reach, revenue and relationships. Revenue Reach Relationships
Customer relationship management system (CRM) To drive the R factor model, the relationship with museum patrons, visitors or customers is vital to track, develop and maintain. The introduction of fully fledged CRM software will enable more effective growth and retention of your community. Reach Revenue Resonance Relationships Relevance
Public connectivity (4G, 5G, WiFi) The connectivity that the institution can avail itself can be a driving factor in what digital engagement can be achieved. Developing countries, those in listed buildings, rural and poorly connected urban areas will often be adversely affected by this factor. Reach Revenue
Mobile device applications These could be seen as luxury items in the digital ecosystem. Do you really need them when visitors might be single visit in their lifetime? What would be your unique selling point, how would it enrich their visit? Reach Revenue Resonance Relevance
Licensing policy and open data Licensing of your digital assets can be key to unlocking research funding, to encouraging reuse and to revenue streams. Institutions including the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the Rijksmuseum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Art Museum have all used forms of the open licenses from Creative Commons to encourage reuse. Note: This does not preclude an organisation from licensing works for revenue. Reach Revenue
Analytical processes/ data informed museum processes As referred to above use the DKIM model to understand your audiences and your Reach Revenue Resonance Relevance
Partnerships Seeking partnerships in the digital arena can aid your mission. Google Arts and Culture, Smartify or others may offer a platform that can boost global audience engagement dramatically. Reach Revenue Resonance Relevance Relationships
Social media Social media is now driving a high proportion of digital engagement across the world. These media could be the simplest way for an institution to engage with its audience at scale, and cheaply. Reach Revenue (maybe) Resonance Relevance Relationships

3.1 Digital Maturity and the institution

A simple and novel categorisation model for museums in the digital age could be generated, along the lines of digital maturity (James & Price 2018; Forrester Research 2017) or the technology adoption lifecycle model (Meade & Rabelo 2004). For this chapter, organisations could be labelled as one that treads water, one that exists within homeostasis, one this is aspirational, one that is participatory and driven by co-operative practice and finally the technophilic trend setter.

3.2 The treading-water institution

Worldwide, many institutions have few staff to run their activities and their facilities and these may struggle to produce a digital experience for their visitors and research audience. They may have a website, a social media profile and a simple catalogue online, or they may struggle to have just one of these and functions are fulfilled by the curator, who is also the manager, the janitor, the docent, the cleaner, the receptionist...

3.3 The homeostatic institution

An institution that inhabits the digital world in homeostasis is probably one of the most commonly found worldwide. The base digital presence for a museum has been achieved and is rarely upgraded until systems break and their digital budget is enough to maintain their presence and new interventions are infrequent. They may have digital artefacts that are aging rapidly deployed around the museum estate, for example screens and kiosks with aging technology.

3.4 The digital aspirational institution

These institutions have grasped the fact they can build a fully fledged website quickly and cheaply using free tools such as site builders (for example SquareSpace, Wix) or open source content management systems (for example Wordpress or Drupal) and generate a social media presence on all the major platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok, Facebook) with relatively little fiscal investment. Digital strategy will be formed to develop new digital experiences regularly and funding is sought out to enrich their digital landscape and the digitally enabled team will be small and multi functional.

3.5 The participatory, co-operative powered institution

Cultural heritage institutions should be based around participatory, two way dialogue based experiences and digital media (Simon 2010) with the opportunity for visitors, staff and participants to create meaningful interactions with legacies. To achieve this, institutional mindset needs to be challenged and acceptance of risk to be normalised. The opportunities for digital participatory experiences are wide ranging - they can be massive impact, highly commercialised such as the mega installations of TeamLab (Demetriou 2019) or the world travelling immersive Van Gogh or Olafur Eliasson at the Tate (Searle 2019). These institutions will often have a strong digital vision and strategy and have embraced social media, may have experimented with user generated content and possibly used citizen science to enrich their collections.

3.6 The Technophilic institution

This type of institution is the rare beast, infrequently found and setting the pace for others to follow. During the author’s career, several institutions have stood out in this category at different periods, often with the same people behind them - for example Seb Chan’s work at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, and at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. These institutions will often have well staffed digitally enabled teams, with reasonable budget allocations coupled with a development team that actively seeks out sponsorship and partnership in the technology sector.

4. Low cost, high return? What could you create?

As discussed earlier in this paper, constraints on cultural and memory institutions when producing digital meaningful experiences are manifold. However, this does not mean that high quality implementation levels are beyond the reach of the well funded!

There is a wide array of technological solutions that can be accessed by all museums if they are willing to use open source software or cheap subscription services, to experiment and to iterate in what they do. Below, a selection of digital offsite interventions are discussed at a relatively shallow level due to constraints of this chapter - but with a caveat. In this fast paced technological world, these services may disappear rapidly. Technology giants like Google have a poor track record for maintaining access to free services; for example their recent foray into the world of 3D viewers is due to close in June 2021 with the shuttering of their Poly service (Matney 2021).

4.1 Institutional website

Institutional websites are often seen as the flagship service to represent the brand of an institution and present memory institutions with a conundrum. Sometimes a divide is readily apparent on what the website is for - a marketing tool to sell the visitor experience, with the academic, research side a second class digital element. As mentioned above, the memory institution’s heart is centred on its collections, and they should use these as the focal point for building content and digital programmes around.

The idealistic nirvana for digital projects is to integrate collections data seamlessly with the marketing aspect, to weave rich stories with compelling narratives. This takes time, people, analysis, iteration and an institutional mindset that does not see their website as a monolithic project that is delivered and left to fester until it breaks. Web technology is very much like a relationship, tend it and it will flourish and the product will be long lived, leave it to its own devices and the path will be very bumpy when it comes to an upgrade.

Tools you can use for this range from enterprise level software (favoured by IT departments who do not deal well with open source disruptive tech), to lightweight content management systems (CMS) used by sector exemplars, for example the beautiful Statens Museum for Kunst[7] (Denmark) website is created on the ubiquitous blogging platform Wordpress which has a massive share of internet penetration - 40% of all websites are powered by this software (Kinsta 2021). The major platform upon which a lot of the cultural sector frequently grounds its web presence is the enterprise level of Drupal (with all of its problematic user experience and interface flaws (Hubbard 2020)). High profile users in the UK include the British Museum, the Science Museum and most of the University of Cambridge academic web architecture, whilst in the USA, a recent survey (Steins 2019) indicated that 46% of respondents used Drupal.

Other methods can involve custom builds powered by ‘headless’ CMS or Applications Programing Interface (API) driven web architecture, however a museum or cultural institution could easily run a free static HTML built website off of Github’s pages architecture using Jekyll, Gatsby, Hugo or other systems; see for example the Egyptian Coffins website (Pitkin et al 2019a & 2019b). Museum websites should communicate the fundamental answers to these timeless questions - what do they hold, when are they open, what events are on and what do they stand for. Long form narrative, activities, video and enriched media can only come when you have the foundational assets and sign posts in place to build the veneer on top.

4.2 Collections tools

A good selection of commercial collections tools can be found on the Collections Trust website (Collections Trust nd) which comply with the Spectrum 5 standard (Collections Trust 2020), but these software vendors may be beyond the financial capabilities of organisations. Alternatives can be found by using fully supported, open source projects that might suit your use case to document and disseminate your collection - they can sometimes serve as a back of house system and to use a phrase that has withered, an Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). Examples include Omeka in either format (classic or S) that they provide (https://omeka.org/), Collective Access (https://www.collectiveaccess.org/) or the Arches system (https://www.archesproject.org/). These collections tools should provide the canvas or the foundation upon which the museum’s narrative and digital experiences can be built.

4.3 Social media outputs

The array of social media outputs can challenge institutions with small and large skill sets and workforce and it is bewildering to see how fast the rate of change has been in this area. Returning to a paper written nearly a decade ago by the author (Pett 2012), platforms mentioned have disappeared, services have transformed and the social media following of many institutions has grown exponentially (for example the British Museum has grown by nearly 1.5 million people.)

When addressing social media, one cannot interact with half-hearted actions; the use of these platforms is often misconceived as a simple, free outlet (Frost 2020), whilst a huge hidden labour cost is to be found when you dig deeper into the use of these media.

Content generation takes planning, scheduling and execution time, the efforts of multiple contributors throughout your organisation and an appetite for a certain degree of risk and a decision on your tone of voice and personality (Dornan 2017). Conversations can often be shallow and pay lip service to multivocality and diverse conversations and sometimes be tone deaf; they can heavily lean towards the museum broadcasting information, to post and then ghost the participants, leaving their responses unanswered and a disenfranchised audience.

Different models of engagement can be taken up by museums which range from broadcast mode to playful and on the edge content production. To achieve goals on these platforms, strategy is a key driver and teams cannot deliver. Returning to the Museum of English Rural Life’s (MERL) success with the large sheep and colloquial turn of phrase, the author of this followed up in a conversation: “We could already have followed up the absolute unit at the MERL with a ton of great collections content if I didn't have to set up our entire ACE NPO[8] at the same time. Time is so important.” (Koszary 2018.)

Creative output requires time, and often the producers of these social interventions have extra tasks within their job description and are asking other colleagues with similar working life strains to assist them. With a small to medium team, a museum would do wisely to consider the platforms it wishes to engage with, whether it can produce the type of content expected, with the frequency that begets followers and of a quality that the institution can be proud of. Should museums be using Tik-Tok for instance (Gat 2019), considering its record of censorship, data mining and irreverent outlook - some have, for example the Uffizzi (Marshall 2020) and possibly divided audience skew towards Generation Z.

4.4 Multimedia outputs: 360, 3D, Gigapixel, Scientific imaging, podcasts, video

Institutions have a huge array of opportunities within the digital content production realm. A panoply of visual delights can be created quickly and cost effectively, and with little technological barrier for onboarding and subsequent production. The use of imaging technologies provides a lens for public and academic audiences/participants to interact with the programming and visual riches of memory institutions. This cornucopia of digital visualisations brings with it Intellectual Property RIghts/ Licensing and Copyright implications which often leaves curators and consumers of cultural works angry and indignant (not to mention morally and ethically challenged when it comes to First Nation data). A good primer for learning more about this can be seen within the Display at Your Own Risk project (Wallace & Deazley 2016) and it’s huge accompanying publication which discusses so many of these issues.

This gamut of techniques and technologies available to us can either reduce or increase the digital divide greatly depending on the resolution you might be willing to capture information in. For example, the 3D imaging world is ablaze with examples of cheap DSLR led photogrammetry/structure from motion capture techniques that can prove that digitisation in this manner is relatively democratic, right up to multi-million euro imaging projects such as the automated imaging techniques used in CultLab3D (Santos et al 2017).

Within this type of digital output, institutions can shoot/record, edit and produce high quality audio visual products for their audiences. Quality of production does not have to be perfect, high quality content can sometimes overcome the shaking lens of the live broadcast, deal with the slightly muffled sound and the confidence levels of the contributors. Practise will rapidly improve the quality of outputs, and the rough and ready nature of video production can sometimes pull in big audience figures on Youtube - take for example the early outputs of Internet sensations such as Mr. Beast[9] (55 million subscribers) or Unspeakable[10] (10.8 million subscribers).

4.5 Citizen Science

Cultural institutions are severely stretched, and as the effects of the pandemic are felt and the world’s economy takes time to recover, workforces may shrink. Citizen science provides an opportunity to harness help from beyond the museum’s enclosures - remote volunteering in the time of restricted physical contact, which can be retained once measures are rolled back.

They also provide a platform for participatory practice, for serendipitous interventions by the digitally enabled and connected volunteers to change the path of research and museum thinking.

A variety of platforms and projects are available to cultural institutions to produce task based projects quickly and easily. The best known platform, Zooniverse (Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium) has realised over 550 million classifications from 2.2 million volunteers (February 2021), a massive figure demonstrating cultural heritage engagement. Other platforms such as the ‘Libary of Congress: By the People’[11] (Ferriter et al 2019), the Smithsonian’s Transcription Center[12] (Ferriter 2016), UCL & British Museum’s MicroPasts[13] (Bonacchi 2019), British Library’s LibCrowds[14] (Ridge et al 2020) and UCL’s Transcribe Bentham (Causer & Terras 2014) for example, have not had the same volume of users, but have also produced similar high quality research data sets, with projects ranging from transcription, image annotation, 3d modelling, remote sensing, morphological analyses to machine learning.

4.6 Partnerships

The use of partnerships in the museum world is again indicative of the digital divide and institutional privilege and the tensions that this brings. Digital activity carries a cachet that sponsors and philanthropists might see as a propaganda vehicle for their efforts; therefore tensions sometimes arise between projects one might be able to do cheaply with open source and the high profile, branded digital outcome. Partnerships can extend into academia, for example the National Museum of Australia and the British Library working with the Australian National University Centre for DIgital Humanities’s students on placements to assist with the production of digital technologies, content and experiences (Ho 2020, Nurmikko-Fuller 2020, Nurmikko-Fuller & Grant 2019).

However, not all museums can attract sponsorship from analogue or technology driven businesses, and fewer still have been able to create strong, sustainable technology driven partnerships with long term dividends. In the developed world, technology companies have forged links with national museums; for example the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s limited public access run Augmented Reality (AR) intervention was sponsored by Verizon, the British Museum has the Samsung Digital DIscovery Centre (SDDC) and a partnership with Korea Air to deliver their audio guides and Google provides the tech for the Maya casts recording project (Coughenour & Cooper 2017) and collaborated on the Virtual Pilgrimage XyFi intervention in room 3 (Uglow et al 2017). From the computer games industry, collaboration between Ubisoft has seen development of large scale use of assets from their Assassin’s Creed franchise blockbuster games with cultural heritage organisations. For example, physical collaborations with Pointe-à-Callière, Montréal on their travelling exhibition Reines d’Égypte (pers. comm. Maxime Durand 2020, Nile Scribes 2018), AR events such as L'expérience Assassin's Creed aux Invalides (Musée de l'Armée 2019)

and VR escape rooms in various venues globally[15]. The recent episodes in the series (Origins, Odyssey and a forthcoming version for Valhalla) have seen the introduction of educational ‘Discovery Tour’ elements, which have used assets from the game and from partner museums and archaeological organisations (see Politopoulos 2019 for critical discussion; Reparaz 2018) with specialist knowledge from curators, historians and experts being assimilated into the Ubisoft framework. These games have also created an academic conduit for analysis, with projects such as Playing in the Past (https://playing-in-the-past.com/) hosting online events with leading experts in their fields discussing the gameplay.

Ubisoft have also provided large philanthropic donations to cultural heritage, notably donating half a million euros to the restoration of Notre-Dame cathedral following the catastrophic fire in 2019 (Vincent 2019). Museums with fundraising or development arms can chase these deals, but they will be beyond the reach of many small memory institutions - reinforcing the divide, and sometimes increasing this to a chasm.

4.7 Don’t be evil.

In 2011, Google created a programme for engagement with cultural heritage (Wikipedia contributors: 2021), initially entitled the ‘Google Cultural Institute’ and now relabelled as Google Arts and Culture (GAC). In some ways, like Europeana, GAC is an aggregator of cultural content on a grand scale, but without the former’s open endpoints for retrieval of information and with a less transparent agenda for cultural service. GAC could be seen as a cultural walled garden - open access focused museums have placed their resources into Google’s system, providing them with a large data bank of information that can be mined, refined and exploited by Google. GAC has been surveyed for its western cultural biases (Kizhner et al 2021) and is frequently criticised on social media by exponents of open access in the cultural sector, for example:

“I HATE how @googlearts has inserted itself as the gatekeeper of art and archaeology. It's a silo that follows no community standards. It claims to be open, but there are no licenses, no APIs.” (Gruber 2018)

The mechanisms for joining and disseminating information on GAC provide another institutional overhead for many already very stretched organisations, but the end results can enable a small museum with poor digital capabilities to reach a global audience with little expense outlaid on their own digital infrastructure. Google has funded some amazing museological projects, for example the Maya collaboration with the British Museum and Guatemala (Coughenour and Cooper 2017), the Bagan interactives, their collaboration with CyArk and their Creative Lab (based in Sydney, Australia) collaborated with the author on an interactive installation at the British Museum in 2017 (Uglow et al 2017).

As the rise in ill feeling towards technology has shown in the last few years, mistrust and disillusionment may see a shift away from collaboration with the tech sector for those museums that aim to exude neutrality, focus on civil enrichment, climate issues and ethical standpoints.

5. Conclusion**

Institutional privilege manifests itself in many ways; not all memory institutions and museums can, could or should engage in all these digital methods of engagement. If a platform is not performing for your institution, do not be afraid to sunset that service (taking backup copies) and communicate that decision clearly to your audience(s).

The digital experience is now one of the fastest changing aspects of museological practice and subsequently one of the hardest for museum management teams to keep pace with. Opportunities in this arena are plentiful, but can prove to be bewildering and a strong digital strategy needs to be in place to make the most of the media that are chosen for outputs.

Think of Matthew’s parable (7:24 - 27) of the ‘Wise and Foolish builders’; if your digital presence is grounded on shifting sands, your house will come tumbling down. You can truly take your museum experience far beyond the walls of the estate by harnessing facets of the Internet, but build your experience within the means that your institution can support.

Attack all your digital projects with this simple question - ‘Why are we doing this?’ - and evaluate, iterate and sustain your digital presence and plan for obsolescence. To make your institution ready for digital evolution, invest in staff training and skills acquisition so that the workforce can harness the tools of the moment. Give them space to imagine what they could achieve, but realise the pace of change is faster than the governance models you might want to implement.

References

  1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heidentor_Carnuntum_4487.jpg ↑
  2. https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcomes-and-specialists/opportunities/1907 ↑
  3. https://twitter.com/TheMERL/status/983341970318938112 ↑
  4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAF0sxmetPQ - first shown July 25th 2020 ↑
  5. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/artemisia-curator-led-exhibition-film ↑
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuL0Q0tsid4 - first shown in October 2014 in British cinemas ↑
  7. https://smk.dk ↑
  8. This acronym stands for National Portfolio Organisation (Arts Council 2018) ↑
  9. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA ↑
  10. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwIWAbIeu0xI0ReKWOcw3eg ↑
  11. https://crowd.loc.gov/ ↑
  12. https://transcription.si.edu/ ↑
  13. https://crowdsourced.micropasts.org ↑
  14. https://libcrowds.com ↑
  15. https://www.ubisoftescapegames.com/the-dagger-of-time/ ↑

Audit

Date completed January 2021

Date submitted: March 7 2021

Date updated: March 17 2021 (Added affiliation for Stirling University and updated text layout)

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