Digital Museum Collections in the 21st Century
The heart and “treasure” of every museum are its collections. Museums have long since ceased to be merely places for imparting knowledge. They provide a framework for multicultural exchange, discussion, and engagement with topics from the past and present. They are digitizing their collections and making them accessible online. Along with this, the perspective on the audience and its potential needs is also changing.
The aim of the collaboration was to look for new ways to work with museum collections – online and on-site.
The people involved in the NEO Collections project are addressing fundamental questions like these. The colleagues participating in the project bring a variety of prior knowledge and experience to the table. Through various experiments and workshops, the project promotes agile work, digital and collaborative thinking, and shifting perspectives.
Three partners are behind this project: the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, the Übersee-Museum Bremen, and the National Museum of Sweden in Stockholm. They jointly launched NEO Collections in December 2019.
The project’s blog is where the participants keep you up to date. Read about our experiences and the impressions of everyone involved – including our guests – as we explore new ways to engage with our collections:
The guide and companion is Abhay Adhikari, director of the “Digital Identities” network. All museum staff involved in NEO Collections work in small teams in their institutions and work as autonomously as possible in manageable project steps that follow one another quickly. They can experiment and test in an open-ended way before evaluating and, if necessary, correcting or discarding a chosen course. In addition, central project topics are regularly brought to the centre of attention within the framework of various workshops. “In 2020, for example, the colleagues at the Übersee-Museum had ‘digital curating’, at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe ‘prototyping and innovations’ and at the National Museum Sweden ‘access to digital collections’ on the agenda,” explains Marleen Grasse, project coordinator at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg.
