We gathered leaders from many of the UK’s leading digital collections together to discuss how new innovations and interfaces can facilitate deeper and more serendipitous exploration of digital collections.
The UK’s museums, galleries, libraries and archives have vast digital collections, but exploring them can be a daunting prospect, especially for the general public. We wanted to explore how new technologies could improve the experience of accessing digital collections, so we gathered sectoral leaders together for the next in our series of digital collections roundtables.
On 11 June, at NGX, the National Gallery’s experimentation space, we brought together digital collections leaders from the British Library, the National Gallery, the Museum Data Service, Wellcome Collection, Art UK, Collections Trust, the National Portrait Gallery, Princeton University Art Museum, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Royal Museums Greenwich. We spent two hours on three questions: what are the most promising new ways into collections, can interactive or immersive experiences broaden their appeal, and how can we sustain or preserve these over the long term?
This was the second in our series of digital collections roundtables, following an earlier session on AI for metadata enrichment. As before, it was a candid conversation between peers. Here are the insights that stuck with us.
Beyond the search box
Keyword search has been called “ungenerous”: it assumes you arrive knowing what you want. As Mia Ridge of the British Library and the Museum Data Service put it, a search box can be intimidating because it takes for granted an ability to navigate a collection’s metadata that most people don’t have.
The clearest alternative is the knowledge graph, which surfaces the relationships between people, works, places and subjects so visitors can browse sideways rather than drilling down and starting again. The Wellcome Collection built one during an internal hack week, connecting its concept pages and pulling in external vocabularies to create links its own metadata didn’t contain. The team has evidence it works: people who land on a connected page during a session go on to view more works on average. The lesson from Wellcome Collection was partly about momentum, as Lauren Baily noted “if you wait until you know something is definitely going to be good, you’ve probably waited too long and spent too long.”
We brought an experiment of our own. Working with the National Gallery, we built a prototype called Dreaming, a voice-driven interface that lets the collection wander through itself on the gallery’s enormous screen, guided by a graph of the descriptions on their website and an AI layer doing composition analysis, computer vision and named-entity extraction. The National Gallery’s Rupert Shepherd explained the visibility problem it addresses: the gallery holds around 2,500 paintings, but a few famous names dominate every search. Tools like this draw attention to the long tail of works sitting right next to the well-known masterpieces.
Substance over spectacle
Immersive experiences reliably draw crowds. The harder question is whether they deepen engagement with the collection itself, or only with a spectacle that sits apart from it. The fear, voiced more than once, is delivering a flashy experience that teaches people nothing, and gives them no reason to seek out the real thing.
The National Gallery’s Imaginarium, narrated by the novelist and poet Sir Ben Okri, offered a more considered model. Delivered through a browser to reach as many people as possible, it guides visitors through around fifty paintings using techniques borrowed from gallery educators. As Lawrence Chiles of the National Gallery explained, the goal was “slow looking”: gentle prompts that ask people what they notice and feel, so they pause in front of a work rather than swipe past it.
The afterlife of a digital project
The most sobering story of the afternoon was about something built thirty years ago. The National Gallery’s Micro Gallery was a fully hyperlinked digital guide to the collection, complete with images and animations, that cost around three-quarters of a million pounds and launched, as Rupert Shepherd noted, roughly a month before the first public web browser. Despite its significance, it was never officially preserved or maintained. Years later, the gallery only has a copy because a former contractor kept one and recently handed it back, along with the emulator needed to run it.
It captures a mindset the sector is still shaking off. As Frances Lloyd-Baynes of Princeton University Art Museum put it, institutions treat the exhibition or experience as the deliverable, after which all the files relating to how that exhibition or experience was delivered are all discarded.
The conversation focused on two different types of preservation. The first was preserving digital projects, where the consensus was to not equate preservation with keeping an experience alive forever. The National Lottery Heritage Fund asks funded projects to stay available for between five and twenty years, but as its head of digital policy Josie Fraser explained, that does not mean running the same headset experience two decades on. It means securing what can be reused: the images, the assets, the metadata, deposited with an archive or released openly.
The second type of preservation discussed was how to recover the knowledge collections generate and usually lose. Every exhibition produces new interpretation and connections that rarely make it back into the records - because for a small museum, where one volunteer may be curator, exhibitions officer and database manager at once, capturing it is one task too many. The answer that resonated was to meet teams where they are rather than demand new ways of working. This led Katie Brown of Collections Trust to mention their hackathon, where our team created a prototype that could gather an institution’s existing files, spreadsheets included, and automatically link the useful information back to the catalogue.
What next?
As much as we love a chin-wag about all things arts, culture and digital, these roundtables have a purpose. They are intended to help digital leaders make better, more informed decisions about improving digital collections for their users.
This session had some clear takeaways: That working at speed can be empowering, that trying new projects means you learn much faster, and that it’s worth sharing prototypes early rather than striving for perfection so long you end up never releasing. But alongside that, Josie highlighted that there’s still work to be done in addressing the tension between freedom to experiment, and planning for sustainability and preservation.
As Katie Brown of the Collections Trust mentioned, putting work in front of people invites the corrections that improve it. And with so many institutions running the same experiments in parallel, sharing lessons openly, including through releasing work made with public money to the world, would help everyone move faster.
If you’d like to be part of future digital collection roundtables, stay tuned for updates on the Museum Computer Group’s Jisc Community, or email [email protected] to let us know you want to be among the first to hear.
