Digitalization is one of the technological trends in the development of human society, and the vigorous development of digital technologies represented by 5G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, blockchain, etc., has profoundly changed the face of all walks of life, and also provided more possibilities for museums to disseminate knowledge and provide public services.
Reporter Peng Deqian.
The latest news is that the East Hall of the Shanghai Museum, which has taken more than 6 years to build, will be fully completed and opened this year. The new museum has set up a wealth of digital interactive experience spaces, including the "Ancient Civilization Exploration Palace" for teenagers, the "Digital Pavilion" for visitors to immerse themselves in the scene, and the open "Cultural Relics Protection and Restoration Experience Hall".
With the continuous evolution of the information age and digital society, the wide application of digital technology has greatly improved the speed and efficiency of information dissemination
How can cultural heritage be presented more vividly through digital means? How can augmented and virtual reality technologies facilitate knowledge creation? How do you sustainably operate digital services without staff? Where is the way to "digitize" museums?In this industry torrent that reshapes the venue experience and expands new functions, museums in the United Kingdom and Germany are at the forefront.
Focus on the audience.
Seek the best technology strategy.
The Science Museum Group consists of five museums, including the Science Museum in London, the National Railway Museum in York and the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, which houses 7.3 million objects in the fields of science, technology, engineering, medicine, transport and media. In March 2017, the Department for Culture, ** and Sport launched the UK Digital Strategy, which aims to make the UK a great place to conduct advanced research, test new technologies and grow digital business through first-class digital infrastructure, advanced skills training and effective regulation. The Science Museum Group is responding to this strategy and is constantly tapping into its digital potential.
When it comes to the two keywords "digital technology" and "museum", the first reaction is often to preserve and display collections and exhibits through digital means. As of April 5, 2023, the British Science Museum Group has produced a total of 459737 digital resources from the fields of science, technology, engineering, medicine, transportation and **. In the first three years of its launch, the total number of visitors worldwide exceeded 2 million, and in the fourth year**, the number of annual visits reached 1.3 million, a year-on-year increase of 75%.
However, it is worth mentioning that the museum's application of digital technology does not stop there, and even the technology applied is not the most cutting-edge and cutting-edge, but adheres to the digital principle of "audience-centered", seeks the best technical strategy, and "lands" in the whole process.
Receiving visitors is the basic form of the museum's service to the audience, and it is also an important income**. Therefore, it is particularly important for museums to improve the quality of their services and attract more visitors to visit. The Group has integrated a variety of digital technologies to optimize and reinvent all aspects of the visit. In 2022, the average visitor consumption of the British Science Museum Group was 581 pounds, a total of 1351£980,000 in visitor revenue.
The Science Museum in London, for example, divides its audience into two categories – visitors and educators, and tailors their "official museum pages" to each of them. On the homepage of the official website for tourists, the "See and Do" tab is prominently displayed, and you can click on the tab to browse the list of all the sightseeing resources of the venue, and there is a combination of filters such as "visiting time" at the top of the list, so that tourists can quickly filter out the content they are interested in according to their preferences. On the homepage of the official website for educators, the most eye-catching position is reserved for the "Learning" tab, which can quickly open the personalized pages customized and developed by the venue for various educational groups, so that educators with different needs can quickly lock in information.
This kind of "differential treatment" does not just stop at the homepage, but is deeply embedded in specific exhibition resources. For example, the "Wonder Laboratory" exhibition hall at the Science Museum in London is an introduction page for tourists, focusing on opening hours, location, annual and daily passes**, sightseeing guides, etc.; The introduction page for educators focuses on the applicable educational age group of the exhibition hall, related courses (e.g., electricity and magnetism, mathematics, etc.), the maximum size of the host group, the reservation calendar, and the educational guide. Accurate service positioning has increased audience stickiness, and the revenue of "Wonderful Laboratory" in 2022 will reach 128£90,000.
Today, more and more museums are realizing that customizing and developing an auxiliary app for visiting activities can help break the limitations of traditional visits, and effectively enhance the audience experience by displaying abstract knowledge such as the background and meaning of collections and exhibitions in an interesting and interactive way.
To this end, the British Science Museum Group has developed a number of auxiliary apps, and "Treasure Hunter" is one of them. When visitors visit the museum, the "Treasure Hunter" app, which is quickly installed on their mobile phones, will randomly propose ** challenges, and if the audience can find the "treasure" that best matches the description and take a photo to upload, they will win. The Treasure Hunter app won the UK's Best Family and Children's App award for its deep integration of digital technology and visiting, turning a visit to the museum into an immersive adventure game.
At the same time, museum operators are constantly expanding upstream and downstream with the help of digital technology, breaking down the walls and extending the content of collections and exhibits to new fields and attracting more attention.
In March 2023, the British Science Museum Group developed 14 apps and popular science games, such as Rugged Wanderer, which attracted a large number of "new audiences" on the web. They also uploaded digital resources from key collections to the popular game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which sold more than 31 million copies worldwide, and more than 250,000 online viewers were exposed to the exhibits in this way for the first time.
Nowadays, with the accelerated development of the information age, digital resources have increasingly become an important way for people to obtain knowledge. To this end, the Science Museum Group provides different Creative Commons agreements for different types of digital resources, allowing the public to copy, modify, distribute and interpret digital resources for free under the premise of complying with the constraints, and freely apply them in education, scholarship, public welfare and other fields. As of April 5, 2023, the Group has provided free licenses for 200184 digital resources, covering various fields such as natural history, science and technology, art and culture, so that more people can access and use these precious cultural heritage and knowledge achievements for free.
Facilitate learning "outside the museum".
Inspire longer thinking.
Since 2017, Germany has launched Museum 4Project 0 – a cross-institutional digital project that connects cultural institutions from different regions of Germany and aims to offer the public new ways to learn, experience and engage with museums. Over time, the range of participating institutions has expanded.
Museums today should be both our past, present, and future. We are the memory and custodians of culture and history, and at the same time part of contemporary society, in which we actively participate through our work. As a medium of communication for the public and artists, we should strive to provide new perspectives and open minds to various cultures, so that museums should be unfettered and creative places today. A museum director said in a previous interview.
Museums of Germany 4There are four main objectives of the 0 project. The first is to gather relevant information and gain experience through the development, testing and evaluation of the digital infrastructure used by different museums for presentation, education, communication and research; secondly, by analysing the ways in which different target groups explore museums, to understand the conditions under which digital technology can achieve personalized goals; The third is to conduct close exchanges between institutions on the requirements, implementation methods and standards in the design of digital applications, and connect and bind their respective technical applications; Fourthly, the results of the project will be shared in the form of a compilation of documents and best practice cases to support museums across Germany in their better digitalization.
German Museum 40 project, the practical case of the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History is impressive.
Like most museums, it has a large collection, and due to its limited conditions, it is often a very small part of it that is exhibited, and the vast majority is inaccessible to the public. To this end, the Senkenberg Museum of Natural History, with its collection of more than 4,000 items, started its own project.
The museum has developed and launched an innovative digital application that blends virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, "Surface Adventure". The game, made possible by virtual reality technology, allows the public to experience first-hand the living space beneath the human feet, which has almost never been carefully observed. Unlike traditional microscope perspectives, virtual reality technology directly reduces the player character to 1 200, so that the player and the organisms in the soil can meet within line of sight and have the opportunity to communicate in depth.
On top of that, players can also break into hidden habitats through the Easter Egg mode and get scientific content that can't be provided by regular displays.
The Senkenberg Museum of Natural History has also launched a walk-in 360° surround projection space "Datarama" for audiovisual and interactive data exploration. It allows the public to step into the story behind the museum in a new identity – in a unique virtual environment, visitors can independently discover the museum's scientific collections, meet and interact with scientists, and gain a deeper understanding of the museum's research work.
Interestingly, the Senkenberg Museum of Natural History has developed two forms of digital tools to encourage interested enthusiasts to actively participate in scientific research. Among them, the "Bodentier Hoch 4" app can help beginners identify soil and animals with experts, which is very easy to use. "Landscape**" is a collection of landscape photos taken privately over the past 100 years that they are willing to make public. These landscapes are located in areas where biodiversity research has not yet been explored, providing a powerful platform for those who want to understand habitat change.
The Humboldt Forum Museum, which was inaugurated in 2021 on Museum Island, is also one of the participating institutions and is known as a super museum because of its more than 20,000 exhibits.
The new experiences brought about by digital technology not only further encourage visitors to seek out, but can also be carefully designed to attract and help more people learn "outside the museum" and inspire longer thinking.
In cooperation with the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Humboldt Forum Museum has developed the mobile app "My Exhibits", which recommends an exhibit that may be of interest to each reserved visitor and encourages visitors to leave their own impressions and descriptions of the exhibit after showing its interconnectedness with other collections. After interacting with others, visitors can reinterpret the selected exhibit and introduce it to their friends through social **. In this way, the reading, understanding and reflection of the collection begins weeks before the visit to the museum, and does not end with the departure from the museum. (Liberation**).