Matching features: museum collections online

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Behind the storeroom door

Most museums can show only a small part of what they own. The rest is kept in storerooms, where only staff and visiting researchers see it. Over the past twenty years, many museums have begun to photograph these objects and publish the pictures online, so that anyone can look through the whole collection. Not everyone who works with collections agrees on what this achieves, or on what it costs.

Ingrid Solberg, who looks after the collection at a textile museum, has no doubt that the work is worth doing. "We own about 40,000 pieces and have room to show around 800," she says. "Online, the rest finally have an audience." She is honest about the effort, though. One embroidered wall hanging can take her team a whole day to unroll, photograph and describe, and after eight years they have published about a third of the collection. She also accepts that a picture has limits. "A photograph shows you the colour and the pattern. It can't tell you how heavy a wool coat is, or how silk moves when you walk."

A common fear is that people who can explore a collection on a screen will stop visiting in person. Kwame Asante, who studies how the public uses museums, thinks the opposite is more likely. In his surveys at three regional museums, many visitors said they had first come across an object online and then made the trip to see it. "A good image works like a film trailer," he says. "It makes people want the real thing."

For Mei-Ling Chau, who runs a folk museum in a small town, the problem is money. "The national museums have whole departments of photographers and web designers," she says. "We have two paid staff, a borrowed camera and Saturday mornings." Grants for this kind of work, she says, tend to go to large institutions, which have experience of applying for them, and she worries that small museums will slowly disappear from view. "If people only look for things online, a museum that isn't online might as well not exist."

Rafael Duarte, a historian who advises museums on objects from Indigenous communities, asks a different question: whether every object should be online at all. Some objects were made for ceremonies that only certain people were allowed to see. Publishing a photograph of such an object, he argues, shows it to millions of people it was never meant for. In his view, the community an object came from should be asked before its image goes online, and a growing number of museums now work this way, publishing only what the community agrees to.

Sofia Marchetti, a digital archivist, warns that an online collection is never finished. File formats go out of date, websites need rebuilding every few years, and every image has to be stored in more than one place in case a copy is lost. "People talk about digitising as if you do it once," she says. "In fact, you are taking on a bill that arrives every year." She has seen online collections vanish when the grant that paid for them ran out.

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