I will be giving a Lightning Talk at the Museums Computer Group’s Museums+Tech 2022 Conference.
When museums were closed during the lock-down, they struggled to connect with their audiences, to display items from their collections and stimulate a societal discourse about culture. The reason for this is often the lack of a front-end for the virtual space besides the website. This lightning talk shows how to build a foundation that enables access to open data, a multi-front-end strategy, and real-time feedback from users.
The physical museum space is viewed as a front end to the public. The talk shows how to present the museum where the audience is as well: in the virtual space. Based on practical experience in the museums of the city of Dresden, this lecture shows how objects already in a database can be made accessible online as structured data via a defined interface (RestAPI) in a machine-readable format, how to build an infrastructure that meets both internal and external needs and to generate synergies through cooperation with natural partners. Based on this interface, various ways of exploratory access to the collection can be developed, such as accessing it via websites, apps, digital signage, citizen kiosks, etc. In addition, the data is used for hackathons and data harvesting processes such as the Europeana. The museum’s micro-service thus becomes an integral part of an open data strategy of the organisation such as a municipality. In this way, the diverse cultural heritage of the museums is made accessible to a larger public and brought into new, virtual contexts.
