Enhancing Public Accessibility to Collections Using Digital and Online Tools

ID: WMA2026_556

Track: Collections

In the name of taking intentional steps toward transformation as one of WMA’s themes for this year’s annual meeting, this roundtable discussion is an opportunity for members of museums of different staff sizes and operating budgets to exchange ideas on how to make their collections more accessible online. Be it full digital programs, adoption of new technology or temporary hacks in response to limited resources, what has your museum done to circulate more materials online? 

Session Information

Format: Regular session/panel (roundtable, single speaker, etc.)

Uniqueness: This roundtable aims to surface ideas that lower the barrier to entry – the low- to no-cost ideas to make baby steps towards greater collection discoverability.

Objectives:

I hope that participants come out of the discussion with the mentality that taking intentional steps, no matter how modest it may feel, is the most important piece of building a digital program. It is rare to have every component planned and purchased from the beginning, but offering users some insight into collection holdings is better for institutional visibility than not starting at all. Whether the knowledge is about a recruiting and training volunteers to help with this work, social media trends to engage new audiences, creating professional-looking photographic shots of objects using rudimentary equipment, or taking advantage of institutional history documentation to add descriptive metadata to objects in a way that could make materials discoverable from different perspectives, I hope participants will learn:

1. one new online platform, software or hardware within their budget that can help them translate (scanning, photographing, etc.) analog material into digital material, and
2. one new online platform or software through which to publish said digitized material online, and 
3. one non-traditional metadata field for surfacing objects in a new light on online/digital information retrieval systems

Engagement: As the host of this roundtable discussion, I will prepare a series of questions with examples to jog peoples’ memories and guide discussion. I will encourage participants to take turns sharing what methods, equipment, software, hardware, and metadata they have used to increase accessibility to their collections online. I prepare to share how we at the Magnes have taken modest to more resource-intensive measures to this end.

Relationship to Theme:

Audience

Audiences: Marketing & Communications (Including Social Media) Registrars, Collections Managers Technology 

Professional Level: All levels 

Scalability: The nature of the discussion is designed to bring museums of varying staff sizes and operating budgets into conversation with one another and talk about how to scale more ambitious digital programs down to a more feasible scale for smaller institutions, and, vice versa, plan on how to expand one-off projects into systematic programs.

Participants