“Digitisation helps us let go of the absolute authority to create the meaning of an object in our collection”
A conversation between Antje Schmidt (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg) and Abhay Adhikari (Digital Identities)
This is a series of interviews introducing the core team of the NEO Collections project — a 4 year collaboration between museums in Hamburg, Stockholm and Bremen.
Please tell us a bit about yourself, Antje.
I studied art history but I never thought I’d work in a museum as I always wanted to be a journalist. Then I ended up spending a semester of my masters degree working with a museum in Hamburg. That was a fantastic experience, as I could spend time in every department and it changed my perspective of what a career in a museum could mean. After that semester I continued working in the press office, which led me to develop a network of younger audiences, before working as a curator and educator in other museums. While pursuing my PhD in the field of museum history, I got the opportunity to work on a digital cataloguing project. It was a new field, which turned out to be really interesting. And so now, I am at MK&G, where I am responsible for digital strategy and how to make our collections accessible and where I combine my interest in communication with my experience in digital cultural heritage.
“The digital aspect of cataloguing allows us to preserve an object in multiple forms — images and scans — but more importantly, connect it to other objects within and outside our institution.”
Can you explain what digital cataloguing means?
In simple terms, digital cataloguing is giving an object an inventory number and creating a data set that classifies an object with all the different perspectives and contexts that relate to it. This could be material, technique, object type and so. Cataloguing has always been done in museums. But for a long time, in my opinion, digital cataloguing has been an underrated activity and something nobody really liked to do. I never understood why, as it has so much potential. The digital aspect of cataloguing allows us to preserve an object in multiple forms — images and scans — but more importantly, connect it to other objects within and outside our institution. And this is where it becomes both problematic and interesting, because there is no one fits all solution to document objects. For example, how do we take an object from east asia and classify it using eurocentric systems.
“…is there a way to represent a lot of data from different sources about an object, in such a way that different users can derive meaning from it?”
Are you saying we need a global standard to classify objects?
It’s very important to have standards and we do use them a lot. But we are not trying to enforce one single system. Then we risk losing something that we are striving to create — multiple perspectives. What we’re looking for is a standard that is conducive to one system of classification being translated to another. There are many layers to this. For example, can we take a perspective from one art historian and equate it to a perspective from another historian? That’s not possible, even within one institution. But on the other hand, if we look at it as a data problem, it becomes a more objective approach — is there a way to represent a lot of data from different sources about an object, in such a way that different users can derive meaning from it. So what we’re letting go of, is the absolute authority that we felt we had in creating the meaning of an object just because it was in our collection.
That sounds like an ambitious goal.
When it comes to letting go of absolutely authority, that’s something we have been working on for several years. The first step we took was to open up our internal collection management system. Prior to that, the curators decided what datasets about an object should be released into the internal database. As a result, even within our institution, we couldn’t understand the full extent of our collection. So we changed our collection management system to allow colleagues from different departments to add to the meta-data of an object. Understandably, this raised a lot of concerns and fears. But on the flip side, by continuing to hold on to authority and creating a culture where we need to ask for permission to contribute, we had to wake up to the possibility that we are also losing a lot of knowledge. Then, in 2015, we implemented an open access policy when we launched our collection online. We invite the public to use the images of the objects in our collection that are not protected by copyright anymore and all of the collections data for any purpose without asking for permission. This means anyone can use them to create new meaning or even new things. So this is an ongoing process where we work responsively with our colleagues to create a culture of knowledge sharing.
“The NEO project is an important next step in embracing a culture of openness and collaboration.”
How would you describe the NEO Collections project?
The NEO project is an important next step in embracing a culture of openness and collaboration. As we have been learning to incorporate the perspectives of our colleagues in sense-making of our collection, we now want to open this up to people outside the institution and invite them not only to use our collection but to contribute to it. Especially for a museum of art and design this is important. We have objects that have associations that go back generations. Therefore, it is vital that we create pathways for our audiences to make these contributions. So our first step is to let people know that we exist and we want to listen to them. Whilst, there is a strong digital side to this project, it will go hand-in-hand with the intangible aspects — by that I mean, having a conversation.
What do you hope to achieve through this project?
As you can guess, this project is about process. We will create digital outputs but it’s also about identifying the gaps in our knowledge of becoming a truly human-centered organisation. We are very excited about what this might lead to. And as a team we are learning to become comfortable with the fact that we don’t know what is exactly going to happen.
NEO Collections is a 4 year project about finding new ways of working with museum collections — online and onsite. NEO is based on the principles of openness and participation. It aims to provide reliable and reusable information and great digital resources to the public and wants to explore how to make the collections more human-centered and accessible.
It is funded by the Digital Culture Programme of the German Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes). Our project partners are: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (Germany), Übersee-Museum Bremen (Germany) and Nationalmuseum (Sweden). Our partner is Digital Identities.
In the coming months we will share updates from the NEO Collections project. This includes our experiments, key learnings and tips. We also plan to host events for our peers in the museum sector. If you want to stay updated you can also drop us a line: neo[at]mkg-hamburg.de. Our hashtag is #NeoCollections.
