During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, smaller museums struggled to engage with online audiences during, and in the period following, lockdown. These problems included low levels of basic digital literacy; poor understanding of audiences; uncertainty over how to transfer real-world interpretive practice to the digital realm; lack of guidance about technical solutions; barriers to future-proofing digital assets; and shoestring budgets.
It seemed to the project team that the difficulties faced by these smaller museums (and many larger ones too) mattered to the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s aspirations for the digital humanities, because they would leave a huge amount of potential source material simply unavailable to researchers. In the team’s experience, too much museum activity relating to digitised collections was resulting in outputs that did not meet the FAIR data principles (data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).
Making it FAIR was framed as a research project wrapped around an action project. Between January and September 2021, the project team worked with a cohort of eight small museums as they navigated the challenges of staying connected with existing audiences, and reaching new audiences, through collections-focussed digital content (the Action Project). The cohort received training, mentoring and technical support to plan and carry out digital storytelling experiments. Meanwhile, with the stark clarity that comes from considering digital practice in small museums rather than complex Independent Research Organisations (IROs), the Research Project provided a critical evaluation of the cohort’s experiences and their implications for infrastructure planning by Arts and Humanities Research Council’s and others. The subsequent report can be viewed here: Making it FAIR Report (PDF , 698kb)
Adrian Cooper, Intelligent Heritage
Kevin Gosling, Collections Trust
Anra Kennedy, Culture24
Sara Perry, Museum of London Archaeology
Darren Reed, University of York
Julian Richards, University of York
Neil Smith, Knowledge Integration
Anne Torreggiani, The Audience Agency
Holly Wright, University of York