Museum online strategy: the advantages of building digital experiences for museums’ attendees

Over the past few decades, the museum attendance has declined. Alternatives that are more entertaining distract audiences, while many simply decide to stay at home instead. However, lessons learned during the pandemic played a major role in beginning to reverse that trend, especially since more and more museums decide to invest in digitalization, making themselves more accessible for a broader audience.

Continue reading to learn what are some of the most important benefits of digitalizing the museum artworks.

The ability to stand out from the competition

By embracing comprehensive digital strategies, museums now have a significant advantage over their competition for audience attention. As a strong digital experience is paired with a returning in-person experience, this advantage is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Incorporating both will make your attraction seem more comprehensive, and attract more audiences than museums that focus only on one side.

Enhancing physical visit experience and enriching the context

Virtual visits and other digital events are great now that they're the preferred option, but they can still be useful even when in-person experiences regain full capacity. They can offer additional insights in a digital format as a complement to a physical exhibition, for instance. A user's understanding of the object's context and meaning is enhanced when not only the object, but details, records, and other interpretative data related to it are shared. As a result of digitization, experts working remotely can compare their artifacts and specimens, thereby enriching information about these holdings much faster. Additionally, digitizing museum artworks creates the potential for people all over the world to contribute impressions, associations, and stories to the permanent record.

Broadening the access to museum’s artworks

By digitizing resources, museums greatly increase public access, facilitate the work of scholars and researchers worldwide, and open new possibilities to educators. Artifacts in digital format are useful for reaching underserved audiences, as well as those who are not inclined to view museums as sources of information.

Preserving collections

To preserve collections, museums must constantly fight against the forces of time and nature. Plastics discolor, wax cylinder recordings distort, and botanical specimens become brittle in spite of best efforts. The digitization of objects provides a way to make their valuable contents accessible without compromising their integrity through handling or exposure to the elements. Digitization enables museums to more efficiently perform activities like conservation and loans from the collections, as well as to take advantage of staff skills and expertise more effectively.

Supporting education

Through digitization, museums can give the public access to a greater percentage of their resources, providing better tools to inspire learning.

Ready to digitize your museum’s artworks with us?

With our valuable experience with integration with SARA, as well as research and knowledge of museums' digital strategies, we have developed an online standard platform with advanced search for artworks. We integrated machine learning into the solution. This way, it is possible to use Google Image Recognition for the artworks to be automatically tagged with keywords that are included in the searches. Our portal also offers users the opportunity to create a profile and save the artworks in users own collection. We expect that the user-facing options will be further developed in the future and thus the opportunity to create an even closer bond with the users. Our research and inspiration from international museums shows that it is possible to create involvement with the public online, as well as achieve an international audience.