Museums in a Digital Age

Ross Parry, Ross Parry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135666316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

The influence of digital media on the cultural heritage sector has been pervasive and profound. Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site.

However, 'digital heritage' (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is complex, diverse and distributed, and its content is available through multiple channels, on varied media, in myriad locations, and different genres of writing.

It is this diaspora of material and practice that this Reader is intended to address. With over forty chapters (by some fifty authors and co-authors), from around the world, spanning over twenty years of museum practice and research, this volume acts as an aggregator drawing selectively from a notoriously distributed network of content. Divided into seven parts (on information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production and futures), the book presents a series of cross-sections through the body of digital heritage literature, each revealing how a different aspect of curatorship and museum provision has been informed, shaped or challenged by computing.

Museums in a Digital Age is a provocative and inspiring guide for any student or practitioner of digital heritage.

Chapter 1 The Practice of Digital Heritage and the Heritage of Digital Practice

Ross Parry

DOI: 10.4324/9780203716083-1

The evidence of change

Museums have much to show for their four decades of computing. And like any professional sector that has learned the hard way to assimilate ‘new technology’, there is equal measure of factors to rue as there are to celebrate. As institutions they can reflect upon several decades of caution provoked by a set of technologies that for a long time, for most museums, were seen as expensive, high-risk, over-hyped and requiring an unfamiliar up-skilling of the workforce. Just as easily, however, many of these same museums can today equally point to new directorates, new workflows and new strategic aims within their organisations, as well as new funding streams and government priorities externally, that are now shaped and driven by the presence and push of digital provision. In a similar way — as venues — museums might recall some of their initial defensiveness to Internet technologies that appeared to encourage an arms-length proxy contact with collections and that seemed to threaten even the primacy of the physical visit event itself. And yet, two decades after the birth of the Web, museums increasingly see their distributed online audiences as important as those physically on site. Ever more these same museums see their remit as supporting collection-based experiences wherever those experiences may take place (be it gallery space or domestic space, city centre or school), and through whatever medium is most appropriate (be it exhibition or publication, blog or documentary). As exhibitors, museums will remember the reticence and suspicion once showed to digital resources and to digital interactives, and how problematic it first seemed to accommodate the ‘new media’ within environments whose credence was understood to come principally from the presence of genuine, material objects. Yet, today, the contemporary museum sector is one in which digital culture is now actively collected, where computer-based interpretive media allows exhibitions to support experiences in more flexible, creative and empowering ways, and where institutions are tuning their modes of delivery and audience engagement to the emerging channels of our evolving digital society. As keepers and researchers of collections, museums can look back on what (at least with the privilege of hindsight) might appear as the awkwardness and contrivance of some of the first attempts to make the free-playing and expressive world of individual curatorship fit into the new standardised systems and data models that first accompanied museum computing. However, since then, more vivid and much more important has been the way these new computer-based systems have buttressed a more efficient approach by museums to fulfilling their ethical responsibility of managing their collections data. With the case now soundly made for digital collections management systems (databases in the museum), what strikes us today is both the growing willingness and the increased ability of museums to interrogate, inter-connect, share and (even) let go of their collections data within and without the sector. Today, it is irrefutable that computing has had a profound effect on how museums manage and make visible their collections. In each of these cases — as organization and attraction, as communicator and collector — there is for the museum an abundance of evidence (as indeed will become clear in the chapters that follow in this volume) to illustrate almost a half-century of development enabled by digital technology.

Unfortunately, sourcing this evidence has tended to be far from straightforward. The resources and the literature, the examples and evidence, the dialogues and debates that together constitute ‘digital heritage’ have tended to be dispersed — located in some quite different forums and media. For instance, a curator attempting to locate and identify precedent and best practice in digital heritage, might initially reach for published guides and manuals — much like those represented in chapter 35 (on project management) or chapter 36 (on digitisation). However, this practitioner is also likely to turn to the several professional curators groups, such as the Museum Computer Network (MCN) and the Museums Computer Group (MCG) and special interest web communities and professional network sites whose activity and membership is focused on museum technology. Typically, the regular meetings and conferences of these sorts of communities (along with their newsletters and publications, their email discussion lists and website resources) offer colleagues in the sector practical and candid advice and support; Carey's presentation to the MCG (chapter 19) is an illustration of one such interaction. It is within the meeting halls and blogrolls of such groups that an important part of the principles and practice of digital heritage are shared and (constructively) opened to scrutiny. Alternatively, a student or scholar attempting to undertake and investigate digital heritage research may also gravitate towards journals with a commitment to publishing in this area (as in the case of Cameron's paper, Chapter 9), or, increasingly, to the growing bookshelf of volumes now positioned by authors and publishers alike as being distinctively ‘digital heritage’ titles (MacDonald 2006; Cameron and Kenderdine 2007; Din and Hecht 2007; Kalay et al. 2007; Marty and Burton Jones 2007; Parry 2007; Tallon and Walker 2008). As an expanding corpus of literature, these texts are testimony to digital heritage's maturing identity and intellectual confidence as a subject; as described, for example, in chapter 43's discussion on the ‘cultural turn’ in museum computing. However, a commercial developer trying to determine the needs and drivers of a client's sector is (alongside these computing groups and academic publications) just as likely to mine the proceedings of international congresses that have routinely acted as a nexus of project reporting, professional networking and product promotion. Annual conferences (such as ICHIM, EVA, UKMW, DISH and, perhaps most notably of all, Museums and the Web) have over many years established their meetings as seminal events for digital heritage), their proceedings highly referenced sources for the subject. However, a policy maker aiming to plan and anticipate future provision based upon existing evidence, might also refer to commissioned consultation and strategic reports; consider, for instance, the vision paper by a national cultural organisation such as of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (chapter 11). Likewise, they might also look towards the work of global bodies such as the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) and the International Committee for Audiovisual and New Image and Sound Technologies (AVICOM) — both constituted under a formal mandate from the International Council of Museums (ICOM), and UNESCO. The ‘working groups’ of committees such as CIDOC (in areas such as digital preservation, documentation standards, and multimedia) bring together international expertise around specific topics and, consequently, can be influential reference points in national digital heritage practice across the world; as illustration, see Roberts' cross-reference to the influence of CIDOC in Chapter 3. Therefore, the reality for anyone working in digital heritage is of an evidence and literature base that is complex, diversified and distributed, with relevant content available through multiple channels, on varied media, within myriad locations, and different genres of writing.

Digital heritage as diaspora

The cause of this diasporic body of literature is manifold. It has much to do with the diverse professional roles and identities of the people who engage with the subject, and not least what each of them choose to call it. Digital heritage practice and research may just as easily attract an educationalist as it may a subject curator. It could equally draw to it the attention of a museum director as it could attract the curiosity of a PhD student. Likewise, it might seize the interest of a technologist and computer scientist as it might a designer or exhibition developer. Put simply, there is no typical digital heritage practitioner or scholar. Then, to multiply and accentuate this scattering of activity, each of these individuals typically has their own subject community or community of practice with which they routinely confer. This community may then be located in very different discursive spaces — curatorial/non-curatorial, academic/non-academic, technological/non-technological. Furthermore, each of these communities may have its own conventions for publishing and debate — be it high profile, international, peer-reviewed journals with high readerships, or more localised, face-to-face meetings and symposia. (Consider, for instance, how MacDon-ald and Alsford, Chapter 8, publish in Museum, Management and Curatorship — an international periodical that has had editors specifically assigned to the area of digital heritage, signalling the journal's commitment to publishing in that area. And yet, the Gansallo piece, chapter 34, is a transcript of a small, closed colloquium on digital curation.) Exacerbating matters still further is the fact that there is no single consensual term to describe activity in this area. Here, for consistency, we choose the term ‘digital heritage’ — a recognised label with credibility and currency for research councils, universities, governments and professional bodies in many parts of the world; see, for instance, Abungu's foregrounding of the term in chapter 18. However, at times, practice and writing indistinguishable from such work presents itself instead as ‘digital cultural heritage’ — as, for instance, the Council on Library and Information Resources does in chapter 39. And yet, to complicate matters still further, for some professional communities ‘digital heritage’ and ‘digital cultural heritage’ are the specialist terms used specifically (and only) to describe those aspects of our heritage that are ‘born’ in (and in some cases may only ever exist within) digital form — that is, our digital ‘heritage’ of such objects as emails, websites, wordprocessed documents, digital images, as well as digital video and sound files; see, for instance, the terminology of the Getty Conservation Institute used in chapter 33. Cognate to (but self-consciously distinctive from) the term ‘digital heritage’ is the closely related area of ‘museum informatics’ (the parlance, for instance, of an influential writer such as Trant in chapter 30), a label more recognisable perhaps to American readers, and implying a genealogy more grounded in information studies than, say, the more humanities-based subjects of museology and museum studies. Alternatively, many parts of the French-speaking world are more familiar with framing and searching this area of practice and scholarship as ‘cybermuséologie’. Work that might be considered ‘digital heritage’ might even still tag itself as ‘humanities computing’ or ‘museum computing’ — the latter undoubtedly the term preferred by Pettitt (the co-author of Chapter 4) as the first chair of the Museums Computer Group. As the products and projects, practices and protocols of using digital media in museums migrate across different cultural and linguistic spaces, their disciplinary allegiances are thus open to realignment, and their emphases and significances can migrate with subtlety. More practically (for our curator, student, commercial developer and policy maker trying to find this material), there still remains the basic problem therefore of what, simply, to call the subject for which they suspect they may be looking.

In other words ‘digital heritage’ (as practice and as a subject) does not exist in one single place; a consequence perhaps of its modernity, of its emergence after and outside the traditional scholarly silos of disciplinarity. Instead, digital heritage's activity and presence both inside and outside these subject demarcations (we might even say, as a post-discipline) is what makes it a challenging and complex subject with which to engage, but it is also what makes it so attractive and liberating for those who practise and study within it. The digital heritage practitioner or researcher may or may not see themselves as part of a ‘subject of digital heritage’ in the same way an archaeologist, an art historian, a palaeontologist or an engineer might relate to their own disciplines. Similarly, the digital heritage practitioner and researcher may need to learn different modes of delivery in order to communicate with the different professional and academic communities to which they might (simultaneously) belong: learning to speak comfortably to the academy as well as to the cultural heritage sector in the language of technology as well as, perhaps, the languages of the social sciences or humanities. It is this dispersion (of literature, of activity, of personnel) that this Reader is intended to confront. For a subject that is decentred and defused in this way, it is hoped that there is a useful role for tools and interventions (such as this) that can offer a judicious collection and meaningful collation of the farflung sources available.

This book as collage

The selection criteria for these texts have been varied — but specific and consistent. First, and perhaps out of step with some digital media literature, every attempt has been made here not to dismiss articles simply on the grounds that they do not represent the state of the art. On the contrary, the aim here has been to set out what is seen as a series of longer and significant developments that help explain museums' (and their visitors') current usage and expectation of digital media. Frequently discourse of technology (especially digital technology) can be permeated with the values of progress and development, improvement and advancement. It is, as such, an area of activity that can all too readily fetishise the future, and neglect the past — even the immediate past. By impatiently awaiting a new upgrade, automatically migrating to the next version, reflexively signing up to the latest Web phenomenon, and quixotically chasing the leading edge, digitality can all too often be fixated by the cultures of ‘now’ and ‘what's next?’ — and delete (if not deride) past practice. Yet, in digital heritage (as indeed in any subject related to technology), we discount our technical and professional history at our own risk. After all, it is in the patterns and trajectories of previous endeavour, and in the decisions and designs of earlier iterations, that we can trace and understand the assumptions and motives, as well as the politics and personalities, whose imprint remain deeply encoded within the later instantiations of technology that we might use today. In this way, in its conspicuous inclusion of articles and extracts across several decades of computing in the museum, this Reader is making a conscious statement about the value of historicised approaches to digital heritage. (Consider, for instance, Williams on the early days of museum computing in Chapter 2, Jackson on museums' first impressions of the Web in chapter 15, or indeed Walsh's initial questioning of trust and authenticity in the new digital landscape, in chapter 24.) In valuing history in this way, this volume makes a plea for digital heritage to look to its past as much to its present and future.

The second point regarding the selection criteria used is that some articles and excerpts have been included here as much because of who has written them as the subject on which they are writing. There ...