Digital transformation (or digitization) of museum heritage is a process that has increasingly spread in recent years and necessarily in the last two years due to the restrictions deriving from the pandemic. The interest in digitization has its first roots mostly in the last decade when the Smithsonian announced the planning of a project for the digitization of artworks; the project was launched at the end of 2013 with the implementation of some of the most sophisticated technologies to digitize 20,000 art objects, namely the ones considered essential in the collection of approximately 14 million artworks at Smithsonian. With this project, the leaders of the US museum offered a vision of the future of museum experience that only recently has begun to show its effects in countless initiatives.
Top1. Introduction
Digital transformation (or digitization) of museum heritage is a process that has increasingly spread in recent years, and of necessity in the last two years, due to the restrictions derived from the pandemic (Choi and Kim, 2021). In general terms, digitization is “the process of transforming analog material into the binary electronic (digital) form especially for storage and use in a computer” according to Pearce-Moses and Baty (2005). When digitization is considered with reference to museums and their multiple goals, it emerged that museum digitization is “an active process of knowledge organization” (Blagoev et al., 2018: 1763) and since its introduction, it has led to offering “free access to museum space without their physical presence being necessary” (Boutsiouki and Polydora, 2020: 232).
The interest in museum digitization has its roots mostly in the last decade, when the Smithsonian announced a project for the digitization of artworks; the project was launched at the end of 2013 with the implementation of the most sophisticated technologies to digitize 20,000 art objects, namely those considered essential in the Smithsonian’s collection of approximately 14 million artworks. With this project, the leaders of the US museum offered a vision of the future of the museum experience that only recently has begun to show its effects in countless initiatives. Another milestone in the introduction of new technologies in museums is the initiative of the British Museum, which, in 2018, has reconstructed some ancient tables with a level of precision never achieved before thanks to virtual rendering; thus, the British Museum paved the way for the reconstruction of objects by collecting information from photographic contributions.
Less than a decade after the breakthrough proposal of the Smithsonian, museum management cannot be debated without considering the offerings permeated by digital technologies. Indeed, a recent report issued by NEMO (2020) noted the progress of digitization in museum heritage. The first observations collected by NEMO members outline a significant increase in the visibility of the collections, as well as significant use of the collections for educational goals and research.
Parallelly, however, museum managers underline how frequently they are not in a suitable condition to address the challenges of digitization; around 75% of respondents report a lack of adequate financial or staff resources and almost one in three respondents claims that suitable tools are not available or that property rights hindered digitization. Nevertheless, it emerged that, on average, over 40% of the collections are digitized, with higher peaks in art and design museums and less encouraging results in natural history museums. Finally, the report shows that digitization is not just online collections; on average only 20% of the digitized collections are available online, due in part to technological complexity, the absence of adequate structures, and intellectual property rights. The NEMO survey reports that most of the digitized content available online is shared through social media.
The analysis of scholarly contributions on the digitization of museum heritage positions the launch of the propensity to digitize back in the past; indeed, already in 2006 Suzanne Keene’s book addressed the issue of possible uses of museum collections and brought it back to 10 years earlier, with the emergence of the first ideas to make collections accessible through certain technologies. The latter, at the time, were defined as revolutionary, while today they are widespread. However, it is worth noting that the use of these technologies with museum heritage was meant as a path for the preservation of collections for future generations, thus opening up considerations towards a more noble bequest value compared to the traditional value in use as the outcome of museum visits. Not only the vision and strategic posture adopted by the museum managers, but also visitor expectations, were analysed by Marty (2008), whose empirical investigation showed digitization meant as a support for both basic purposes (such as the retrieval of information for visits or the acquisition of indications about temporary collections) and more advanced purposes, such as the creation of unique experiences that do not replicate – or duplicate – the physical context, but favour the personalization of the experience itself and the structuring of online interactions.