Embracing Digital: A Curator’s View
A short film about digital curation and a glimpse behind the scenes of digitization processes at the MK&G Hamburg
Digital documentation has often been seen as something separated from the daily museum business. In this video, Curator and Head of the East Asian and Islamic Art Collections of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Wibke Schrape shares her holistic perspective on digital curation: for her, documenting means giving agency to an object, from the moment it comes to the museum, being photographed, measured, conserved, documented in the database, and — if possible — shared with the public.
Filmmaker Dellair Youssef follows her around the galleries and depot spaces of the MK&G and shows what (digital) curation means in her everyday work and how she tackles the many challenges in a hands-on way. We also gain insights on how experts from different departments of the museum work together to digitize a large scale William Morris wallpaper and get a glimpse into the 3D-digitisation of Japanese lacquer work.
As the MK&G holds more than 500.000 objects in total, much resources, care and expert knowledge are needed to fully document the huge collection and also to publish it digitally. It is an endeavor many museums share, some of them just starting their journey, others having rich and extensive records. And yet, documentation is an ongoing process that never will be finished. New objects are being acquired, new findings are gained, new connections are discovered. Technical possibilities and requirements are evolving. Formats, standards and also the way we are documenting are changing — outdated vocabularies require new perspectives and a contemporary language free of discrimination.
Since the documentation process creates complex digital surrogates, these can be seen as new objects themselves. It will be essential to document this form of knowledge production as an expression of its respective time that is constantly evolving with societal and technical changes since the very beginning of museums and collections.
#NeoCollections advocates new ways of accessing and re-using collections, posing new questions, visualizing connections and making blind spots visible. Digital documentation is a prerequisite for this.