A compass to help museums develop crossmedia services

By Harry van Vliet on 10 November 2010

‘Museumkompas’ is a research proposal submitted for a RAAK grant (www.innovatie-alliantie.nl) that will start in the spring of 2011 and will run for two years. The project will be implemented by the Crossmedialab in collaboration with several museums, Erfgoed Nederland, DEN, and an expert agency in the field of information management in the public sector (BMC).

The aim of the program is to support professionals working in museums in developing new and robust crossmedia services. These professionals are increasingly faced with changing expectations of the public, the increasing influence of digitalization on the development of public services, and the growing need for acquiring additional funding because government funding is not guaranteed anymore. Heads of collections, curators, managers education and presentation, project managers and staff members new media must try to withstand these developments. More so: they must embrace and shape them.

‘Museumkompas’ will provide museum professionals knowledge and skills, and engage them in the development and implementation of crossmedia solutions in the context of their own institution. The program provides tools with which an educated choice for crossmedia services, combined with the strategy of the institution is made possible. A systematic approach to control and accountability of these services is an extension of this.

The chosen approach is an approach of intertwining knowledge circulation and applied research, making the results first and foremost practical. These results are directly focused on interventions in the museum, such as the development of concepts and prototypes, and the implementation of new services by way of field-tests. The results will also be more generic and surpass the usability for only the participating museums: the ‘Crossmedia Museum Monitor’ is a benchmark that maps out how strong the ‘crossmedia’ footprint is of a museum is, the ‘MuseumGuide’ will work as an aid to the institutions to position themselves in the cultural heritage field, a workbook for museum professionals in order to evaluate business models and to construct these themselves, and a toolkit of performance indicators including guidelines which performance indicator suits which crossmedia service. We present the whole as a compass for professionals in museums to guide their crossmedia services.

The project partners have found each other based on the desire to improve the current and future services provided by museums. Participants at the start of the project include: Museon, TwentseWelle, Naarden Vestingmuseum, BMC, Hogeschool Utrecht, Beeld & Geluid, Digital Heritage Netherlands, the Armando Museum, Stichting Vrede van Utrecht and others.

tagged with: crossmedia, business models, cultural heritage

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