Digital Resources for Museums in Canada

We’ve noticed an increased interest from art and heritage museums in integrating their digital strategy with a digitization plan. We’ve also been talking to local museums about upgrading their digital content strategy tactics.

Our firm has been following information concepts and trends identified by the Museum Computer Network, the Ontario Museum Association and the Canadian Heritage Information Network.

We’ve also noticed recent work done by our GLAM colleagues that we would like to highlight.

In 2021, Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre published a Digital Content Strategy. Importantly, this report outlined the following key performance indicators: social media analytics, web analytics, visitor and customer satisfaction surveys, adoption rates for new programs, revenue generation, % of the museum and archives collection digitized and available online.

In the Woodstock Art Gallery’s 2023 Digital Strategy, they outline four tactic areas:

  • Establish and Maintain Core Digital Resources
  • Refine the Digital Footprint of the Woodstock Art Gallery
  • Develop Digital Content Capabilities
  • Develop Digital Decision-Making Skills

Digitization Plan Policies & Concepts

The Canadian Heritage Information Network has produced a table of links to reports for GLAM workers implementing digitizing their collections. These reports highlight existing standards and guidelines to ensure artefacts are scanned or photographed correctly.

We’ve noticed that the Ontario Museum Association has created a tool kit called Digitization Standards.

The Ontario Museum Association has provided a learning resource to help GLAM workers integrate their collections with industry practices for digitization. They’ve also included a high-level overview of the stages required for successful management, curation and preservation of data.

Digitization Plan Visual - The Curation Lifecycle Model helps you to define research data management workflows and associated roles and responsibilities within your organisation. The data-centric model supports a holistic approach to RDM infrastructure development and optimisation and can be used to help organisations map research data management activities and support across functional and operational units.

You might find the top half of this graphic useful for starting conversations among your colleagues in different departments.

In this abstract, the DCC describes their model in this way:

The DCC Curation Lifecycle Model has been developed as a generic, curation-specific, tool which can be used, in conjunction with relevant standards, to plan curation and preservation activities to different levels of granularity. The DCC will use the model: as a training tool for data creators, data curators and data users; to organise and plan their resources; and to help organisations identify risks to their digital assets and plan management strategies for their successful curation.

In addition to the above sector-specific resources, we’ve found useful tactics from the broader digital marketing community. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve put together some tips in this insight on how to maximize your online presence using Digital Content Development tactics. We’ve also explored how important it is to have a digital strategy at the centre of your plan to increase visitation, suggesting a loyalty loop for culture could be a useful conceptual framework.

US Baseline National Survey on Museums Digital Readiness

This field survey, examining the digital readiness and innovation maturity was a partnership with the American Alliance of Museums, capturing data from 480 museums of all sizes across 50 states.

30% of respondents were art museums, 38% were historic institutions and sites, and the remaining 11% were science museums and others. Survey respondents – 65% of the institutions were small museums, with annual budgets of USD 5 million or less and had fewer than 49 employees. Museums responded to this survey before the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the report outlines that those museums with dedicated resources and larger budgets fare better on this continuum, I am curious to know if there are outliers where a museum can demonstrate its ‘secret sauce’ to stay connected with audiences and communities.

Knight Foundation Chart provides a Continuum Matrix

This chart on page 5 of the report classifies museums’ digital readiness along a continuum of untapped, emergent or realized for the following aspects:

  • Strategy
  • People
  • Practices
  • Audience
  • Partnerships
Museum Digital Maturity and Innovation continuum, provided by Knight foundation report. This chart on page 5 of the report that classifies museums along a continuum of untapped, emergent or realized for the following aspects

Reflecting on Museums post Covid

This paragraph describes the importance of resiliency in our current times:

In this uncertain and truly difficult time for cultural institutions, the pandemic is forcing
many institutions to adopt new ways of designing programs and exhibitions, and centering
digital outreach as a core museum activity. Constructing cross-departmental teams to
focus on digital, and providing training for that effort, will enable museums to be more
resilient to a hybrid in-person/online dynamic that may become commonplace in the next
few years.

Closing Reflection – page 10 – Digital Readiness and Innovation in Museums, a Baseline National Survey, October 2020, Knight Foundation

As an example of constructing cross-departmental teams, with a focus on digital, we have created another insight that explores software tools and strategies to work across silos within a museum.