Digital reviews

As a museum type, I didn’t want to love the new arts and culture digital offering from the big guys. Of course, the big guys have endless money; they can do groovy, expensive things that the little guys can only dream of. Of course it will be all bells and whistles and not enough substance. I’m obviously going to dislike it. Except, I didn’t. I really, really liked it.

Google Arts & Culture launched its Once Upon a Try online exhibition in March to surprisingly little fanfare. It has partnered with the likes of Cern and Nasa, and more than 100 museums in an attempt to tell the story of human invention and discovery. The term online exhibition doesn’t come close to doing it justice. An online museum filled with exhibits and exhibitions is closer to the truth.

Yes, there are bells and whistles – there’s an augmented-reality app, but it refused to download on my Apple and Google devices. I gave up and focused on the oodles of brilliant web content instead.

The vast array of content hangs on one overarching narrative journey through the history of human endeavour and discovery. It’s a clever team that can find a way of presenting such a diverse body of content in such an easily navigable experience. 

If us little guys can learn anything from this project, it is that developing web experiences with users, not the institution, at the centre is key. For example, users don’t think, “hey, this is cool”, because it’s a collection of the Deutsches Museum’s images about humans learning to fly. Instead they think, “hey, this is a cool story about humans learning to fly”. Their second thought is hopefully, “wow, I like the sound of the Deutsches Museum”. 

This project demonstrates how a museum’s best assets are the stories they can tell, as these give users compelling routes in to explore collections.

The Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels is rebranding as Art & History Museum and, as part of this, it has delivered a mini-website that functions as a temporary online hoarding, put in place while it develops a new web presence. It’s a great idea, but it also unexpectedly throws up some interesting questions about how much museums should put online. 

Since the dawn of museum websites, their common aim has been to digitise as much of their content as possible and get it all online. The collections data about objects has been everything and the stories or cool facts about these objects have rarely been seen.

This mini-website unintentionally turns this notion on its head by choosing to showcase only 10 “masterpieces”, presenting them in beautiful, image-heavy vignettes that give a compelling glimpse of the collection.

I am left wondering whether this could herald an interesting new approach for institutions in how they go about presenting their collections online in future. 

The recently redeveloped Bristol Old Vic has introduced a suite of heritage exhibitions and experiences to communicate its story as the oldest working theatre in the UK. These include an augmented-reality experience that enables audiences to glimpse iterations of the theatre’s foyer space from the 1760s to the 1970s. By using one of the theatre’s tablets, visitors can see breathtaking historic renderings of the space they are in. 

The weird bit is that the foyer space is mainly made up of a large cafe/restaurant now, so you are often standing among diners as you move around with the device and gaze at the Bristol Old Vic of the past. So it can feel a little awkward at times. 

But the experience left me excited – this kind of technology is a perfect fit for the heritage sector and I am looking forward to peering through more windows into the past as this technology becomes mainstream and other institutions adopt it.