What is the public value of an online collection? Why should museums and archives invite digital artists to deconstruct and rebuild their online collections experience? This paper argues that the traditional online collection- a database of object records- is fundamentally designed for research audiences, and presents very few opportunities for serendipitously engaging the casual browser. It will propose that in order to reach new audiences online, museums and archives should be less concerned with technical innovation and more interested in enabling and publishing creative reuse of collections; they should promote their collection as a resource bank to creative practitioners who design compelling digital experiences; and that designing digital heritage experiences to inspire curiosity and wonder is more important than facilitating learning. This paper will refer to the innovative Half Memory project as a case study. The project, developed by TWAM with Tusk Music and Pixel Palace, invited musicians, sound artists and film makers to use TWAM’s collections as a resource for creating engaging (digital) heritage outputs; outputs that recontextualised historical material in order to inspire new audiences.

1. Deconstructing the online collection:
the value in creatively repurposing museums and archives
John Coburn
@j0hncoburn

2. 9 museums and galleries
1 archives
1.1 million objects
450,000+ records online

3. The role and public value of the museum online collection…

6. Functions as an educational resource for people
who know (roughly) what they’re looking for

7. Objective historical
context
Dates and
chronologies
Audiences who are satisfied with meaning extrapolated by museums
Representative thumbnail images
Object production data

8. Overstating the value of the online collection…

9. Online=
new, diverse audience with incentives to
explore

10. Online=
Enormous
database=
new, diverse audience with incentives to
explore
rich, navigable content

11. Online=
new, diverse audience with incentives to
explore
Enormous
database=
rich, navigable content
Object record=
engaging museum experience

12. Online=
new, diverse audience with incentives to
explore
Enormous
database=
rich, navigable content
Object record=
engaging museum experience
Innovation=
technologies that duplicate the “object
record experience” as social media/
apps/augmented reality etc

13. “(the value of) digital in the museum is not about endless
collections web development it’s about developing new
forms of curatorial practice”.
Seb Chan, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

14. How do we enable the development of richer, more
compelling collections experiences online?

15. Pilot project with Tusk Music and Pixel Palace arts programme.
Inviting film makers, musicians, sound artists to identify resonant
collections areas and create new work we can publish online.
Published work intended to inspire new audiences with collections.

16. Promote the collections as a starting point/connection point for ideas and
creativity.
Audiences who•
Have the motivation and passion to create.
•
Ruthlessly apply new critical perspectives to collections.
•
Deconstruct collections and objects, connect their meaning with ideas and
concepts.
•
Create experimental, ambitious work with a captive audience in mind.

17. Public engagement aims• Not teaching history but inspiring wonder, stirring imagination,
sparking empathy for the past.
• Compel a new public exploration of collections.
• Inspiring new proposals for creative reuse of collections.

18. “An album of songs concerned with the functions and consequences of violence.
Family. Opposing forces of creation and destruction, memory and time, birth and
death, body and soul”.
Richard Dawson

20. “We’ve created a film and a suite of new songs, which is not about the
Metro’s construction as such, but takes and holds on to some of the
spirits conjured by these pictures. It’s an experiment in the pairing of
sound and music, using rhythm and repetition to evoke and entrance, and
think about the position of hope in civic life, forty years and a lifetime on
from the origins of the photographs”.
Warm Digits

23. Open call for sound and music responding to a broad North East
historical theme; work that disrupts an understanding of the past.
“35 hour broadcast hoping to rearrange and create new meaning
from the past”.
Imagined soundtrack to the construction of the Tyne Bridge, montage of oral
histories and electronic music, field recordings, performance, found
sound.

24. Creative processes for identifying
resonant collections

25. The remarkable, beautiful, buried story

26. Harmonious aesthetics
(post-war technological modernism and European urbanism)

27. Illuminating the one compelling detail

28. Playing with poetic gaps in an object’s narrative

29. Thematic, visual search
(and museums are usually terrible at this)

30. The voice of the museum is silenced;
objective historic interpretation is erased.
Animated concepts, ideas, stories, questions create impact,
not objects.

31. Impact

32. 10,000+ people accessed the produced work via online platforms and live
stream
High depth of public engagement- dwell time and interaction
40,000+ subsequent visits to (raw) collections material online
Disseminated by diverse audiences, evidence of non-museum audiences
(affinities to music/museums/sound/transport/local history)

33. Provide the right collections access and people will
dedicate themselves to reusing it:
491 hours
(daily rate of £250= £17,535)

34. Museum as ideas enabler,
not experience designer?

35. 11 subsequent proposals submitted independently
Museum exploring role as “ideas enabler”
Museums as a home for good ideas, a space to develop
creative practice and seed innovative outputs.

36. Recreating “aura” from objects: drawing
machines continually sketching the collection.

37. Documentary film exploring social
activism of the Spence Watson family

38. An examination of 3D printed objects and the
effects of various stages of fidelity

39. The Man Who Thought The Moon Would Fall Out of the Sky
(already developed, performed and touring independently of TWAM)

40. Success is not the quality of what’s produced but audiences
understanding they have permission to create with collections.
Creative space and freedom has high value and exists more often outside
the museum!
Emphasis is on meaningful experimentation not technology; original
format could be digital or physical.
Not a commissioning process. No declared funding.
The kernel of each proposal is our collection and what’s created gives it
new meaning.

41. John Coburn
@j0hncoburn