Workshop - register now

Wednesday, April 01, 2020: 1:30pm - 4:30pm -

Duane Degler, Design for Context, USA

“Digital” is not a department, it is part of the fabric of our institutions’ work, yet many institutions retain silos of information and disconnected processes.

The 2018 Mellon Foundation “Report on Grantmaking Programs” highlights this challenge:
“An emergent but pressing sector health concern for ACH [Arts and Cultural Heritage] is the lagging capacity within the museum field to build and sustain robust twenty-first century knowledge-management cultures… that over decades have segmented content production, storage, and dissemination in ways that are unsustainably expensive and run counter to a public access mission.”

To meet changing internal and external needs – and keep up with changing technology – museums need to be flexible, supporting integration across different information-creating departments. We have an opportunity and a responsibility to foster a vision that engages our communities and opens up information to support museum missions and strategies. But what does that mean in practice?

This workshop provides practical steps for museum staff who want to understand the current state of information management and articulate roadmaps for sustainable evolution. Through discussion and small-group exercises, we will explore techniques to:

• Assess your current and historic information value, quality, and availability (including non-digital materials)
• Imagine and describe improvements for information capture, sharing, discovery, and use
• Separate data/content management from delivery to increase flexibility
• Consider ways to evaluate usefulness of current and emerging technologies
• Gather feedback on actual use and on user needs – internally and externally

This workshop draws on experience across a range of museums and archives, exploring ongoing integration of digital capabilities in museums of all sizes. Understanding your information requires engaging people throughout your institution, because the challenges are human, as well as technical.

Bibliography:
TBD.