Collections Online

This article reflects on the process of digitising a collection of almost 1800 Victorian Valentines cards. The Museum of London’s card collection is only a fraction of an individual’s extensive collection of greetings cards. This article argues that the work of documenting and photographing the cards revealed information about the nature of collecting. There have always been inconsistencies between professional and personal collecting activities: the museum acquired just part of the collection because the entire collection was so vast it was considered unmanageable. Collections online and digitisation work has suggested several points about the nature of the collection as context and this short article discusses some of these ideas.

Potentials of scientific research in general are obviously subject to changes in accordance with current digital information and communication environment, which is capable to give new, advanced performances, or those essentially different from the traditional ones, even in the domain of humanities, including literary studies as well. In this connection, developing a digital heritage repository, as a way of organizing and composing objects of heritage in selected thematic entities, is demanding, but also inspiring possibility in the case of literary heritage as well. The aim of the proposed paper is to examine potentials and advantages of developing a digital repository of Meša Selimović’s literary work. The focused problem is going to be approached in a holistic manner, which means in terms of its practical and cultural values, but also in terms of its feasibility. The authors of the proposed paper are taking interdisciplinary methodological sides, which is caused by the authors’ d...

Das Vermittlungsangebot von Museen weitet sich in den digitalen Bereich aus und Digitale Sammlungen stellen einen Ansatz der Erweiterung dar. Es besteht das Anliegen, die Gesamtheit einer Sammlung für Museumsbesuchende online zugänglich zu machen und damit die Zugänglichkeit zum kulturellen Erbe einer Gesellschaft zu erweitern. Digitale Vermittlungskonzepte unterliegen jedoch anderen Bedingungen der Strukturierung, Zugänglichkeit und Gestaltung als physische Museen, da sie mit Hilfe des Mediums der grafischen Benutzeroberfläche sichtbar werden. Nach einer Ein-führung in die Aufgaben heutiger Museumsarbeit, der Aufteilung der Sammlung in Ausstellung und Depot sowie einer Einführung in das Medium der grafischen Benutzeroberfläche, folgt eine Untersuchung von Digitalen Sammlungen. Es wird untersucht, wie sie sich in ihrer Strukturierung, Zugänglichkeit und Gestaltung von Museen unter-scheiden. Dem theoretischen Vergleich schließt sich eine Analyse von zwei Digitalen Sammlungen von Museen an.

Museums extend their educational mission into the digital realm and Digital Collections are part of this extension. By doing this, the museums seek to make a whole collection accessible to visitors online and, as a result, to make the cultural heritage accessible to a broader spectrum of society. However, digital concepts are subject to other conventions for structuring, designing and making accessible resources than physical museums because here a graphical user interface functions as a medium for making them visible. After an introduction into what modern museum work involves, into how a collection is divided up into exhibition and depot and into the medium graphical user interface this paper analyses Digital Collections. It will be looked at how they are structured, designed and made accessible in a way different to that of museums. Finally, after the theoretical comparison, the paper presents an analysis of two Digital Collections of museums.

Based on first-hand teaching experiences and inspired by the exciting conversations happening at the “Museums and Object-based Learning in the Era of COVID-19” session at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), we curated some learning activities that use online museum collections and resources. We hope that these activities inspire you to include online museum collections in your teaching.

You can read the blog series here: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2021/01/19/m-is-for-museums-teaching-with-online-museum-collections/

Inwieweit können digitalisierte Kunstsammlungen als Herausforderung und Potenzial für ein museales Publikum verstanden werden? Und auf welche Weise können Museen die Online- und Offline-Welt auf eine sinnvolle Weise miteinander zusammenführen?
«Kunstkammer 2.0» untersucht vordergründig die Erweiterung von Kunstsammlungen in den virtuellen Raum als gegenwärtige museale Strategie. Dabei wird sowohl die Entwicklung von Museumssammlungen als historische Referenz herangezogen, wie auch das Phänomen «eMuseum» als Plattform für virtuelle Exponatbetrachtungen analysiert. Die sich gegenwärtig entwickelnden, digitalen Archivierungsstrategien musealer Sammlungen werden dabei vertieft auf ihre Herausforderungen, sowie Vermittlungspotenziale hin erörtert.

Das Paper wurde im Rahmen des Studiengangs MA Art Education Curatorial Studies im Zuge der Lehrveranstaltung «Geschichte und Theorie des Ausstellens I» unter der Leitung von Prof. Thomas Sieber im Herbstsemester 2018/19 an der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste verfasst.

Libraries and museums are well-positioned to positively affect their users with the knowledge they produce, especially when publishing online collections. Through a process called "grooving," the way knowledge is produced and how technology presents it affects the way we understand the world. Libraries and museums are in a position of power because of the trust the public gives them. GLAM institutions need to be aware that some collection items are more difficult to fit into these systems than others. These records with a "higher barrier of entry" require additional attention to make them more visible and findable in online collections beyond just the bare-minimum metadata.
In this presentation, we will use the University of Notre Dame's Marble (Museum, Archives, Rare Books, and Library Exploration platform) project as a case study to explore how linked open data can enhance discovery of GLAM collections, as well as some of the ethical concerns preventing access. As trusted cultural institutions, libraries and museums need to do better at involving local communities in the cataloging process and communicating the ambiguity, bias, nuance, and changeability of the metadata in their online catalogs to users. Catalogers need to be aware that the systems that we use can still prevent certain collections from being found, even if they are available online.

Many databases and web-based search engines are being developed to give Indigenous people better access to museum collections important to their history. This paper looks at existing solutions in Australia and overseas and details the processes, protocols and lessons learnt in an ARC E-research project: “Developing a prototype multi-institutional search engine for Australia Indigenous collections”. The prototype search engine connects two Indigenous museum collections – the Donald Thomson Collection and the R.M. & C.H. Berndt Collection. The project aimed to find a balance between access and restriction, protecting intellectual property and developing cultural protocols. The project is driven in part by Indigenous community interests in accessing historic photographic collections and the need, on the part of institutions, to correctly identify individuals and objects. The potential of online annotation tools was explored as a way of developing an ongoing dialogue between Indigenous communities and museums. Questions to be addressed include: Are web-based systems appropriate for remote communities? What is a ‘user-friendly’ interface for Indigenous people? Does the integration of cultural protocols require a sophisticated access system or can you keep it simple?

Open Access: https://www.museumsbund.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/final-gasser.pdf

Seit der Einführung von Museumsdatenbanken erfolgen interne Workflows weitgehend digital. Erstaunlicherweise sind Abläufe mit Externen –zum Beispiel im Leihverkehr, für Auskünfte oder bei Bildbestellungen –international noch wie zu analogen Zeiten organisiert. Der Beitrag erörtert, was digitale Transformation bedeutet, wenn Kunstmuseen die vorhandene Datenlage mit längst verfügbarer Technologie nutzen. Der gezielte Ausbau der bereits jetzt online zugänglichen Sammlungspräsenzen zu einer multifunktionalen Plattform führt zu präziseren Anfragen und damit zu professionelleren Dienstleistungen.

Cultural heritage institutions are spending considerable effort and resources to provide online access to their collection catalogues and collection management systems, usually through their institutional websites. This improves accessibility and supports research and engagement by diverse user groups, as well as meeting the increasing expectation by audiences that this type of information will be freely and easily available online. However, cultural organisations have not responded to these needs in the same way and have been employing different web tools and features to present their collections online. In this article, we argue that the technological implementation choices and the type of content provided reflect also the philosophy of communication of the institution itself. We used the constructivist approach's learning theory and theory of knowledge and combined these interrelated epistemological and cognitive perspectives to analyse the communication philosophy of a large...

Les pièces polémiques du xvie siècle relatives au développement de la controverse religieuse et aux guerres de Religion en France constituent depuis plusieurs années un objet de numérisation massive. La course à la numérisation est un moteur de redécouverte, de catalogage et de valorisation du corpus des libelles qui forment désormais des collections convoitées. Ce phénomène est surtout perceptible aux États-Unis. Les collections des French Pamphlets, qui englobent non seulement les libelles du xvie siècle mais aussi les pièces polémiques des autres époques comme les mazarinades ou encore celles datant de l’époque de la Révolution française, constituent des corpus autonomes qui font objet de projets de numérisation et de valorisation innovants.

Cultural heritage institutions are spending considerable effort and resources to provide online access to their collection catalogues and collection management systems, usually through their institutional websites. This improves accessibility and supports research and engagement by diverse user groups, as well as meeting the increasing expectation by audiences that this type of information will be freely and easily available online. However, cultural organisations have not responded to these needs in the same way and have been employing different web tools and features to present their collections online. In this article, we argue that the technological implementation choices and the type of content provided reflect also the philosophy of communication of the institution itself. We used the constructivist approach's learning theory and theory of knowledge and combined these interrelated epistemological and cognitive perspectives to analyse the communication philosophy of a large...