The digitisation of museum collections seems to be going through a Golden Age. The recent announcement by the New Opportunities Fund that it will spend £50m on the digitisation of the UK’s national heritage is impressive, but merely mirrors the tens of millions that are being spent worldwide on digital heritage initiatives.
Australian Museums Online (AMOL), the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), and numerous European (CORDIS), Latin American (ILAM) and North American (NINCH) museum networks are rapidly building up similar virtual collections.
In the years to come, museums worldwide, often under pressure from their respective governments, will make hundreds of thousands of digital replicas of artifacts and works of art accessible through the web as their showcase. The question is: to what end?
At first sight, the results seem remarkable. Digitisation already alters our ways of relating to and perceiving works of arts or historical artifacts. A simple Google image search, for instance, on ‘William Turner’ turns up as many as 3,400 images in as little as 0.43 seconds. Once you’ve excluded the photographs of people with the same name, the repeated images and other dubious search results, it still remains the most inclusive display of his work. Building your own digital gallery has thus become a commodity.
At the same time, our relationship to and knowledge of museums is changing as well: By the middle of this year, the 24-hourmuseum website provides access to over 2,500 museums and galleries online. With a click, opening hours, locations, and special exhibitions or information on collections are available. National Museum Portals worldwide offer an ever growing quantity of data, such as AMOL (400,000 collection records from 1100 Australian museums), CHIN (200,000 records from 700 Canadian museums) or the French JOCONDE (132,000 images from 75 museums). The supporting databases avoid the excessive hits we get through less specialized search machines such as Google. Therefore information on museums is no longer specialized knowledge, but transparent, (mostly) up-to-date and free of charge. Especially for tourists these portals are increasingly becoming the first step of their visit to the onsite museum.
FROM DATA TO CONTENT: MUSEUMS NEED A DIGITIZATION POLICY
Never before have museum audiences had access to so many resources. But what do we gain from these ever-growing sites? Knowledge, pleasure, experiences – or just the much praised ‘access’? The web has turned us into browsers of information (be it music, photos or documents of all kinds). The quantities already surpass our imagination. The egalitarian notion of ‘access’ to cultural resources is used as the main goal and justification of heritage projects. But access alone does not answer the bigger question of how these resources can be converted into meaningful digital content. How can museums curate virtual spaces which engage online museum visitors, encouraging them do more than browse, but to learn about and experience its artifacts?
Right now, museum online are not museums, but archives. We can browse for artifacts and basic information. But the database has become the dominant way that museums present their collections to online visitors. ‘Digitisation’ in this context really refers to the method used to process objects and information. Objects and descriptions from diverse institutions such as libraries, archives and museums are standardised and then presented through catalogues and inventories: a format that is hardly exciting. True enough databases help to search information. But they do not advance an appreciation of the artifact and its complex social, historical or symbolic context.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIAL SPACES
As a result, museum websites offer very little of the experience we gain from traditional museum spaces. Museums often do not present themselves as interpretive spaces on the net, but data storage facilities. On the Web, digitization has, at least temporarily, translated the onsite profile of museums from information interpreters into mere information providers. The social and civic space museums were able to develop through their buildings so far has not been matched by the Web. Why?
Physical space, as Tate Modern, the Jewish Museum in Berlin or the Guggenheim in Bilbao show, plays a crucial part in a museum’s profile. Museums regard themselves as showcases of material objects that visitors can physically experience on-location. They have been praised as new civic cathedrals, as renewing forces of run-down harbour fronts or agents of a new social consciousness: In all of these roles architecture has played an essential role. In their expansion to the web, museums lack such a profile. The virtuality of the Web is perceived as a distortion of this encounter.
THE FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN REAL VERSUS VIRTUAL OBJECTS
One can hardly dispute the differences between real objects displayed in an onsite museum and their virtual reproductions in an online environment. But an exploration of museums and virtuality does not benefit much from the assumption of an apparent antithesis, whereas it gains from an investigation of common grounds and shared objectives between the two. The false dichotomy between real versus virtual (or ‘authentic’ versus ‘copied’) simplifies the multiple meanings objects acquire through cultural history.
By definition, museums are artificially constructed environments, designed for displaying objects that were not originally produced for this setting. Many objects now held in museum collections went through several ‘homes’ as, for instance, Rembrandt van Rijn’s early ‘Self-portrait as a young man’ (1630). Acquired by Sir Robert Kerr, it was presented to Charles I in the early 1630s and made its way to the palace at Whitehall in London. After the king’s execution in 1649, the royal collection was sold. Today, Rembrandt’s self-portrait has found a new home in the Walker Museum in Liverpool.
Seen from this angle, the virtual representation of objects on museum websites only mirrors and re-configures the earlier transfer of the object from its ‘authentic’ (original, historical, physical or emotional) context into the museum environment. Museums redefine the value and the meanings of an artifact by taking it into their collection: Its digital counterpart on the Web challenges the frame of reference one more time. Thus, re-location of objects is not new to museums: museums are experts in framing objects in ever new contexts, and the Web is just one of them.
DIGITIZATION AS CONVERSION
Digitization means a conversion of an object which is three dimensional into a two-dimensional electronic representation. But the transfer of digital replicas to the Web transcends mere reproduction technology. The Web as all other media creates a new experiential space. Media are tools to construct realities rather than just to represent reality. Like TV or film, like radio or photography, the Web does not only depict or mimic the existing world, but also composes new media realities (that in their way shape the existing world).
Online curating and content development departs from traditional display concepts because it takes place in a new medium. If the media is the message as Marshall McLuhan stated, how can museums translate their curatorial expertise to this new medium, the web?
The experience of space and time in a virtual environment departs from a tangible material architecture. But our language shows that we understand the Web as a spatial endeavour. We surf, we go to a website, we build one ourselves. It is a “place that has no soil, no boundaries, no near, no far” (Weinberger 2002). Simulations of the natural world conceal that the Web is an artificial world, as flexible as we want it to be.
Information architecture has just begun to explore its unmapped potentials. A new generation of online exhibitions has started to offer richer experiences of the objects by creating meaningful spaces. Online activities can offer educational interactives for younger visitors (like the exhibition on the breaking of the German enigma code by the Imperial War Museum, the climate change exhibition at the London Science Museum or the exploration of objects with interactive tools at the Natural History Museum Website).
Tate Britain experimented with less playful, more encyclopedic formats in its William Blake Online Exhibition. The Victoria and Albert Museum as early as 1997 used their Shamiana Exhibition as a platform for virtual cooperation in the creation of a unique collection of textile panels. A look at the award winners at the international ‘Best of the Web’ competition for heritage web design, show how fast the repertoire and language of virtual shows are evolving. Using a montage of images, sound, text, and design as well as various navigation strata, virtual exhibitions can become emotionally and intellectually stimulating environments.
ONLINE EXHIBITIONS
Online exhibitions nurture a plurality of voices through using diverse media. But the Web is a nervous medium, a cabinet of wonders and curiosities. Everything is just a click away. Time is interest-based: If we lose interest in a site, we do not hang around in an effort to be polite. We click on. Time spent on the Net is often discontinuous, stopped as easily as started again. Web semiotics make for faster consumption, and it is hard for museums to develop their own voice within this new environment. Online visitors do not necessarily have a shorter attention span, but a clearer determination about what they will spend their time on.
The Web is a social construction, designed, developed and sustained by millions of people. But how can museums develop their sites as more engaging social spaces?
Although the onsite visitor can not touch artifacts in traditional museums, she ‘interacts’ with them through being in the same space and approaching them from various angles. The online visitor lacks this experience, other forms of interactivity are therefore essential on the Web. The many ways to explore an object through technology-mediated layers (such as zooming in on the object, seeing it from various angles or even the inside as well as exploring its manufacture through links on its material composition or historical frame) allow new learning experiences. It is less what we see, but do with the object that characterizes the potential of the web as a medium. The current emphasis on the composition and ensemble of artifacts in physical museums might be changing to an open and interactive approach on the Web that permits visitors to become commentators, contributors or even co-producers. What works, what doesn’t?
Continuous evaluation and creative experiments are both decisive to determine how digital content can be developed. Software can help to monitor and analyze patterns of online visits. Evaluation software should be built into the structure of the website itself so that continuous data is available to reconsider or strengthen certain features (and can also be used to convince sponsors). But the Web is a new medium in constant change. Evaluation alone cannot provide the models and failures. Although the development of data standards and the digitisation of artifacts continue to be costly enterprises, online shows do not need to be. The Web thrives on ideas, but not necessarily on expansive displays. On the net, good ideas make their way to the surfer very fast. Working with digitized information is cheaper, faster, and more flexible. The low production costs of digital content makes it an interesting tool for small and large museums to experiment with concepts, to find new partners and to redefine themselves.
The web snuggled itself into our lives and institutions. Although our habits are increasingly challenged and changed by the Web, its potentials largely remain to be developed. The Web is still in its childhood years. Museums started to use it as a promotional vehicle, then as an interface to their stored collections. With both, museums assumed that their website is a subsection of their activity, part of the press, education or archives department. But the Web is neither just a technology nor a tool. It develops its own rhythm and rules that not necessarily need to be the traditional habits museums have already established. While spending considerable funds into digitization, many museums currently do not have a digitization policy at hand on how they want to turn data into content. Online exhibitions, guided tours of collection highlights, interactive and media-advanced displays of artifacts are some of the ways to create meaningful virtual spaces.
Long-term goals and openness to the new medium are instrumental to determine and sustain a digital profile. By definition regional, on the Web museums are turned into global institutions. As important as shared standards are (from the implementation of accessibility guidelines for disabled online visitors to the participation of all museums in national museum portals), different concepts are equally relevant. Some museums will improve regional cooperation with schools, libraries and archives through the Web; others might redefine themselves through collection-based networks beyond geographic borders. For some museums, their website will be an integrated part of their overall profile whereas for others their offsite and onsite locations may become distinctively different. ‘Digital objects’, ‘online visitors’ and ‘virtual communication’ re-define museological premises. Most museums have a mission statement for their physical space developed out of its physical restrictions. Now it is time to define their digital profile beyond mere reproduction.
REFERENCES
Imperial War Museum: Enigma
Science Museum
Natural History Museum London
Tate Britain
Victoria & Albert Museum
DIGITAL HERITAGE PROGRAMS
Australian Museums & Galleries Online
Canadian Heritage Information Network
European Commission Digital Heritage Information Society
Joconde Database
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
Best of the Web 2002 awards, Museum and the Web 2002
BIBILIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE ARTICLE
Klaus Mueller: Digital Watch. In: Museumsjournal, Oct 2002. Vol. 102, No. 9, British Museum Association.