What is Digital Curation in Museum - Part 3

Education for Museum Professional

When I searched in the database like Google Scholar using ‘digital curation and museum’ as keywords, many scholars suggested that there is a need for design for courses and educational programs in university to help museum professionals with training of digital curation skills. Because the museum hopes to hire staff who are skilful curator, and on the other side has working experience or academic background in museum.

Museums of all types need professionals who has relevant data curation skills. However, there is a challenge in digital curation for museum professionals. Museums like art museum, natural science museum or history museum have different disciplinary of collection management and data selection，and that require different expertise and experience.(Ray, 2013).

Display of Digital Object

How to add value to digital material is one of the differences between digital curation and the concept of basic preservation, and it is also an important task for museums in the digital age. Also, it relates to how to show those born digital collections to audiences - after all, they have no physical existence!

V&A has a long history with digital work collections early back to 1964 which was a computer-based image created by A. Michael Noll. And then in 1968, the museum really started their collecting in digital artwork. So in the late 60s, curators have been already concerned about digital preservation because a new material of artwork has started being used and concerned. If you want to see more about digital curation at V&A Museum, please follow the link on YouTube: https://youtu.be/9B3rIP2SI5Q.

To help visitors better understand how digital collections work, the museum adopted new technologies and create interactive experience in the physical exhibition. For example, they use mobile devices to display apps in which a special exhibition showing technology evolution, and provide the opportunity for people to touch the screen and to find out how apps work.

Threats to digital materials

Even for museum collections, whether it's the art creation of born digital or the image record after digitisation, digital files seem to be an extremely secure and reliable backup - it can be copied and saved. In fact, digital materials are also facing many threats. The museum digital curation is even more complicated than the management of physical objects! Indeed! Even digital objects need to consider the damage that natural disasters can cause. Because the location of the device where you store the data may be affected by physical factors. Therefore, ensure that the museum has corresponding backup files or emergency measures. However, many museums now purchase commercial digital asset management systems, and all data is accessed via the Internet, which reduces their concerns in this regard.