Museums today try to ride the digital wave by developing and especially maintaining digital products like smartphone apps, info-screens and new websites as well as being present on portals like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Flickr. The development and maintenance work is both time-consuming and expensive – and often the museums will have difficulties assessing the quality of the counseling provided by the IT-development companies.
In a collaboration between a group of museums and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) the focus is on building a sustainable and open platform that can distribute data to different digital products.
In our presentation the steps of the collaboration will be explained, including the development of a series of digital products (eg. apps for smartphones, info-screens and a website) for small and medium-sized museums and a shared domain, where all involved digital objects are search- and shareable. DR's strategy for the development of an open sourced “back-end” platform CHAOS: \ _ (Cultural Heritage Archive Open System), which serves as the backbone in DR's wish for flexible use of digital content from the heritage partners, is introduced. The creation of new content using methods from journalism, and not traditional museum communication, is described. Finally, in this phase of the project where most of the smartphone apps are launched, the key learnings are explored.
The project shows that the smaller museums involved have come much farther than even larger institutions can come on their own. Together, it is possible to save money, develop the institutions, gain valuable knowledge and insight on how users want to explore valuable heritage content, and create new formats and platforms. When public cultural institutions share skills, content and technology, significant value is being created.
