Digital IncubatOr fOR muSeums

Project Information

DOORS

Grant agreement ID: 101036071

DOI

10.3030/101036071

Project closed

EC signature date 5 July 2021

Start date 1 October 2021

End date 30 September 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Europe In A Changing World - Inclusive, Innovative And Reflective Societies

Total cost

€ 1 000 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 000 000,00

Coordinated by

ARS ELECTRONICA LINZ GMBH & CO KG
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DOORS (Digital IncubatOr fOR muSeums)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2023-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

For decades now, new technologies have challenged the role of museums. As new media proceed to change the ways in which the public accesses and acquires knowledge, the institutions that traditionally served as spaces of knowledge dissemination must also change. Museums and cultural institutions must respond to and mirror the changes in today’s societies with infrastructures and programmes that harmoniously blend onsite and online.

DOORS - Digital Incubator for Museums comes to support museums at a moment in which attitudes towards the digitalisation of the sector are changing. The accelerated pace of digitalisation in all pockets of society and the pressure from the competition with on-demand content create not only daunting insecurity but also a desire for change in the sector. To adapt to the new constellation - especially in the aftermath of a global pandemic – the museum sector started addressing digitalisation with a new sense of urgency. The digital transformation is now seen as a necessary, urgent, as well as exciting endeavour.

DOORS combines in-depth analysis of the status-quo and a self-reflexive diagnostics framework with the practical implementation of a wide array of digital pilots. We invite museums to join DOORS and submit pilot proposals to take part in a two-stage incubation programme. The incubator focuses on innovation areas crucial to any lasting transformation. Developing new revenue models, innovating audience analysis and engagement, and designing skill-building programmes for museum staff will be our overarching priorities.

The goal of the first stage in the incubation programme is to define the general terms in which digital strategies can be conceptualised and embedded into existing contexts. Forty museums will have a chance to refine their initial pilot proposals and decide on a focal innovation area, whether it is audience analysis and engagement in hybrid and digital environments, new distribution and revenue models, strategies for digital infrastructure integration, or an experimental ICT programme.

In the second stage, twenty of these institutions will work on the implementation of their digital pilots together with tech and creative industry partners and supported by members of the Orbit. The cross- and inter-sector collaboration will help overcome the discourse of competitiveness between technology and culture and fears of the digital cannibalising the analogue, to promote instead, the importance of preserving diverse forms of content distribution in society.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

DOORS‘ first 12 months were coined by deepening our understanding of current practices, needs and digital transformation plans of small and medium sized museums at large and our group of 40 practitioners particularly. The consortium understood in the early stages of the project that this assessment requires various sources of information and data:
- good practices to identify benchmarks and serve the practitioners as visionary examples and motivator (as collected in the DOORS’ SPARKLE reports),
- data collected from the sector on their current digital maturity and digital gaps (DOORS’ survey) as well as
- self-reflection reports from the piloting institutions to start their individual assessment and prepare them for the pilot implementation.

In parallel, the consortiums key priority was and continuous to be offering smaller and medium sized museums opportunities to make the most of digital technologies and services to innovate their digital processes and digital presence. DOORS’ first stage incubation program was able to lay an important ground and support museums through:
- a total of 15 workshop sessions to increase their capacities, but also accommodate peer-to-peer exchange,
- connecting them to a pool of technical providers,
- introducing them to more than 40 international sector experts, including 28 professionals who led the incubation program and 5 advisory board members and
- provide them with a shared cloud-based resource repository and communication platform.

Lastly, DOORS’ activities were supported by an active outreach and communication. We connected to more than 100 museum networks, country alliances and key partitioners to promote our open call and survey. And we ensured a strong promoting of collaboration and innovation in the museum sector at European level through introducing DOORS at major European events.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We believe DOORS incubation program is a future-proof framework for building digital transformation capacities in small and medium sized museums and an important steppingstone for these practitioners who are disproportionally affected by the digital gap and urgently need access to technologies and expertise. Up to today, DOORS provided a unique opportunity for museums to reflect and challenge themselves. The enthusiasm for and success of the incubation process manifested in the way that many projects built on learnings from it to become more focused, more audience-centric and define clear objectives. Many practitioners stepped out of their comfort zone and contributed to what has become an ecosystem of possibilities in terms of digital content, impact, engagement and business models. Further, DOORS brings together a fantastic range of projects across a large variety of cultural institutions, including nature, art, science, social history, and historic houses.

Also, the DOORS team deems the examination of the status-quo and the assessment of the needs of museums as an extraordinarily insightful result from the assessment phase of the project and essential for developing an Incubation Programme that responded to the current needs of small and medium-sized museums. While desk-research and targeted qualitative interviews were foreseen from the beginning on, the consortium decided to go beyond the DoA and conduct a survey on the digital maturity, status-quo and needs of the museum sector - specifically designed for small and medium sized museums. This led to a tremendously important understanding of the challenges these practitioners face and how they can be supported in their digital transformation journeys.

All the changes require a long-term commitment rather than a one-off effort. Just as well, because digital is here to stay, making the sustainability of any digital transformation a must. We acknowledge that programmes geared toward individual digital projects are important to build confidence of practitioners in small and medium size museums and bridging the existing digital gap. Programs like DOORS provide funding not only directed towards the implementation of the projects, but also for their support in necessary training and upskilling activities. For the existing digital gap to be overcome, partnerships and collaborations must be fostered, and a culture of collaboration that enables knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning must be embedded in the sector at large.

In addition to that, the rapid development of digital tools and the costs involved in integrating and maintaining them as part of the day-to-day activities of cultural institutions cannot be neglected. Now that museums have started doing the groundwork and are preparing for the digital transformation, it is time for policymakers and society at large to recognise the importance of keeping up the momentum and support the work done in the sector.

Digital Museum Content

Digital Museum Spaces / Deep Space 8K