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Breaking Boundaries, Creating Connectivities: Enabling Access to Digitized Museum Collections

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Culture and Computing. Interactive Cultural Heritage and Arts (HCII 2021)

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Abstract

Museum staff as gatekeepers to cultural heritage are central to enabling or constraining user interaction with museum objects. However, organizational barriers frequently hinder staff's ability to invest in expanding user access to digitized collections. In this chapter, we analyze staff practices that help create online opportunities for user engagement, which we argue is a process of actively expanding and negotiating infrastructural boundaries of connective capacities. These boundaries constitute and expose an “installed base”, which refers to the backbone of infrastructure, and the existing practices and norms from which work takes place. Drawing on two case studies, our analysis suggests that changes to the infrastructure, including the expansion of digitized collections and tools, builds on and is shaped by the installed base. By centering user needs and leveraging their place in diverse heritage networks, staff are able to overcome infrastructural boundaries that shape and hinder practices of designing for access. This study illustrates, in particular, the ways in which staff are compelled to negotiate perceptions of what constitutes both an “authentic” museum object and a professional museum role in order to enable user access to digitized collections.

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Acknowledgements

. This work is part of the POEM (Participatory Memory Practices) project and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764859. The authors would like to thank Prof. Dr. Gertraud Koch, Susanne Boersma and Inge Zwart for their comments and suggestions on different drafts of this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Cassandra Kist

  2. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Quoc-Tan Tran

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  1. Cassandra Kist
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Correspondence to Quoc-Tan Tran .

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  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Matthias Rauterberg

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Kist, C., Tran, QT. (2021). Breaking Boundaries, Creating Connectivities: Enabling Access to Digitized Museum Collections. In: Rauterberg, M. (eds) Culture and Computing. Interactive Cultural Heritage and Arts. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12794. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77411-0_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77411-0_26

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