Creating a digital museum during lockdown

Ahead of the UK entering lockdown in early March, the team at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery were already thinking about how they could offer cultural activity digitally.

“We knew that significant closures of public buildings and restrictions on public gatherings were coming,” says Charlotte Moon, the organisation’s museums and schools programme officer.

“The closure of cultural spaces was likely to increase the already above-average levels of social isolation and loneliness experienced by residents in our town. 

"#HastingsDigitalMuseum was established with aim of providing a space to reduce social isolation and loneliness by creating opportunities for people to engage in cultural activities through social media.

Moon and her colleagues brainstormed ideas for content for different audiences, eventually deciding to have a weekly theme and focus content accordingly.  

“We treated the first week of lockdown as a trial run for #HastingsDigitalMuseum,” Moon says. “We tested whether our ideas were easy to produce, appealing to our audiences, and if they were reaching the right people.

“Now, a couple of months down the line, e-learning and online engagement are central to the museum’s offer. The building may be shut but we are open online as #HastingsDigitalMuseum.”

The team initially planned for 12 weeks of lockdown, broken down in three four-week blocks. At the end of each block, the museum reviewed what it had done and adapted its output for the next period based on feedback.
“Initially, our weekly programme was built around self-generated activity made by staff, but this was time-consuming and limited by the information we could retrieve off-site,” Moon says.

“After the first few weeks, we could see what kinds of resources were attracting the most engagement, so we were able to scale back the production of activities and build our weekly programme around the high-quality creative activities commissioned through our freelancer funding stream – thanks to an initial donation from local charity the Chalk Cliff Trust – and core family educational activities.”

Projects produced by freelancers include an online interactive adventure using the museum collection and running across multiple platforms. It also ran an activity where participants explored the museum from their own homes with a storyteller. Meanwhile, members of the in-house team have created short videos; broadcast through Facebook Live; and recorded lectures for SoundCloud.

The museum has taken a “quality not quantity” approach, Moon says.

“We decided to concentrate our output on active participation by users as we felt this was more in line with our aim of creating opportunities for people to engage in an activity rather than be passive viewers or receivers of information,” she adds.

“We prioritised creating opportunities for digital face-to-face engagement in real time in addition to maintaining those activities that were already delivering high levels of engagement and valued by local people." 

The museum was quick to launch its digital presence and Moon says that, aware of the proliferation of online cultural content being produced by the sector as well as the increasing demands on the council’s resources, it decided to pause for “serious reflection” after the first few weeks.

“In the planning of our digital response, the scale of the democratisation and sharing of cultural activity online had not been fully understood,” she adds. “This output of cultural content online includes many great examples of high-quality activities that delivered on the aim of our digital museum.

There are also many that deliver a passive experience for users. Ultimately, support from the community and council leaders made us decide to continue.”

Moon recommends museums experiment with digital content and evaluate as they go: “Focus on resources that promote active engagement. Put active participation by users at the heart of your approach.”

The museum plans to continue #HastingsDigitalMuseum until at least September and much will depend on when museums are able to reopen.

Moon says: “As a small team, we can’t operate a socially distanced museum and a digital one. We will need to work out a way to transition between the two.”