Creating Digital Collections: Museum Content and the Public

Abstract

The internet is a valuable asset for making cultural heritage accessible to a broader audience, and in recent years many museums have experimented with methods of sharing their collections online. This move towards a digital presence for museums has raised questions about the role of curators, librarians, and other information professionals in creating and maintaining digital collections. If anyone can collect images, and display them together on their personal website, what work remains for cultural heritage professionals to do?

Using data collected from webscraping using Python, we evaluate the explicit metadata associated with online collections of objects created by both the public and museum professionals. We look at museum websites which offer the public the ability to develop their own, personal collections from the museum’s digitized holdings, (namely the Rijksmuseum) as well as collections utilizing similar technology on the Pinterest platform, in order to answer questions about the difference between professionally curated online collections, and ones created by the public. With the understanding that perceptions of images can be manipulated and altered by the context within which they are situated, we argue that distinguishing between professional and public collections can help information professionals better manage and anticipate patrons’ expectations and the methods they use to make meaning out of digital cultural heritage objects.