What is Digital Curation in Museum - Intro

Almost every museum has a mysterious room where a dusty history is waiting to be revealed. Indeed, the artefacts we see in exhibitions may just be only a small part of the museum's vast collection storage. Unlike goods in the warehouse, museum collections have their own characteristics and complex cultural and history context. So how do museums manage their collections? At the same time, with the advent of the digital age, born-digital artwork was created and collected by museums. These digital resources have special properties compared to physical collections - for example, data loss is a common failure during transmission. In the face of the situation where collections are made in different materials, will museums still use the traditional method of object acquisition, registration, storage and documentation?

This blog may help you think about the questions above. Here you would know:

• What is digital curation? And why we put it in museums?
• What is collection/assets management in museums?
• What efforts should museum do for digital curation?

Some facts about the blog

This blog is based on a summary of the research of my project in the Digital Curation course. In fact, understanding of the term ‘digital curation’ is a very long and complicated process for me. There is a very interesting cultural misunderstanding in this. In the academic use of this phrase in Chinese, ‘curation’ was first translated into Chinese by Taiwanese museum scholars. However, ‘curation’ itself has a specific meaning which and is referred to “the museum’s use of collections and other tools to plan, arrange and operate all relevant work of museum exhibition and display". In this way, “digital curation” was directly translated and interpreted in Chinese as “the process of using digital technology to help staff planning and designing the exhibition, and also to enhance the audience experience with interactive digital devices”, or “exhibition with a cyberspace-venue”. However, the Digital Curation course corrected my previous understanding and made me think about museums from the perspective of information management.

So, in the first part of the blog, I will introduce some related topics to the definition of digital curation and the model of the curation work to try to clarify what may digital curation in museums look like.

The second part of the blog will mainly be the explanation for the activities and tools which museums currently adopt for collection management. In the early stage of my project, I first targeted what is called ‘collections management system’, which literally means the working system for information management of museum collections. I will majorly quote Freda Matassa’s book Museum Collections Management: a handbook major for this topic, as well as my working experience in Islington Museum as an intern.

The last part of the blog will list the development prospects and issues that need to be addressed in the research of the museum's digital curation. In fact, there is a small portion of research papers specifically discussing about digital curation in museum, and most of them talk about professional training and related curriculum design, as well as specific data terminology guidelines for museums.