Enabling Access to Digitized Museum Collections
By: Quoc-Tan Tran
Tags: User Engagement, Digital Design, Cultural Heritage, Participation, Museums

A part of this text is appropriated from a talk Cassandra Kist (cassy kist) and I gave at #HCII2021 conference on 25th July 2021.

Thanks to everybody who came to our talk as part of the panel ‘Digital Memory Modalities — Inquiring the Role of HCI for Participatory Memory Practices’ in the Human-Computer Interaction conference (Computing & Culture section). Even though we can’t be in Washington DC in person, Cassandra Kist and I are grateful that the virtual conference platform enables remote participants to access live, interactive networking opportunities and content.

The panel, convened by Prof Gertraud Koch (University of Hamburg), gathers participants from diverse disciplines (cultural heritage, cultural anthropology, digital and participatory design) to explore the potential of human-computer interaction in personal, institutional, and ecological memory practices. The six papers outline the relevance of media technologies for memory-making processes, which will serve as a foundation for developing digital memory modalities that are more responsive to the experiences of different groups of communities or users.

Six papers were presented in our panel at the HCII2021 conference

The panel: HCI in participatory memory practices

Memory-making practices bridge the gap between personal and collective histories, and this suggests that memory-making is an iterative process within any given social context. As Gertraud Koch points out in her introductory article to the panel, memory-making has both individual and collective dimensions. It refers to shared experiences within a particular historical epoch and space marked by distinctive institutions, events, and ways of life.

At the same time, technology has permeated every aspect of our lives, including memory-making processes. Within this panel, the papers seek to explore how digital culture has changed the face of participatory practices and shown the dilemma of opening up. The speakers are also interested in understanding how participatory practices might change the way we think about memory, archiving, and user engagement.

Some key questions stand out:

What are the affordances and limitations of participatory memory practices?

What are the challenges of “opening up”? Is it a step-by-step or “by design” engineered process?

Is openness the same as publicness?

How is this relevant to our article?

Cassy and Tan’s article focuses on the role of infrastructure in memory institutions, particularly the museums, and how staff through digital means design for access to cultural heritage. What are crucial factors that impact staff practices in creating online opportunities for user engagement? What are the implications for human-computer interaction and digital design communities? Our article is part of the outcome from POEM, an EU-funded project focusing on participatory memory practices.

The paper discusses the development and use of museum infrastructure through two case studies: one at the Open Museum (OM) — Glasgow Museums, and another at Swedish National Historical Museums (SHM). But first of all, let’s go back a bit into 2019 when we asked ourselves the question: what do we like to achieve in this collaborative work?

Collaborative fieldwork

My colleague, Cassandra Kist, and I started our fieldwork at Glasgow Museums in August 2019. As the COVID-19 pandemic wore on, ethnographic data from Swedish National Historical Museums were obtained by online interviews with staff.

We considered museum staff as gatekeepers to cultural heritage and central to enabling or constraining user interaction with the museum objects. Throughout our fieldwork, we aimed to identify organizational barriers that frequently hinder staff’s ability to invest in expanding user access to digitized collections.

Drawing on two case studies, our work suggests that changes to the infrastructure, including the expansion of digitized collections and tools, build on and are shaped by the “installed base.” By centring user needs and leveraging their place in diverse heritage networks, staff in two museum groups can overcome infrastructural boundaries that hinder practices of designing for access.

Infrastructure perspective

Now we get into the fundamental question: what is the role of infrastructure in enabling museum access and creating opportunities for user engagement?

Below are the two photos I took in August 2019 in front of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, a member of Glasgow Museums. On the left is the sign showing access for people in a wheelchair to the museum. On the right, you see the sign indicating a small track where museum objects can be delivered in a safe way into the storage.

By infrastructure, we mean not only the physical building, racks and cabinets, boxes and trays — equipment facilities located inside the building that make the museum function — but also the everyday practice, goals, and intention of the staff, what the museum workers witness and do on a daily basis, that will again, shape the smooth functioning of the institution.