Status Quo - How Digital are Open-Air Museums?

Open-air museums are vast repositories of cultural heritage data, most of which are currently located in physical archival records, photos, video, and – not least - in the minds of museum staff and volunteers. 

There is a real risk that without a robust process for capturing and storing this data, it will be lost forever. How do open-air museums use digital media and tools?

Ethnographic open-air museums have a more coordinated approach to documentation workflows compared to their archaeological counterparts. They are after all dealing with “originals”. As with any other museum object, great care is taken to record as much detail as possible: Original position of translocated houses, history of translocated houses, transport of translocated houses to the museum site, and state of repair and deterioration. 

There may be value for archaeological open-air museums to adopt some of the documentation approaches from ethnographic museums.

Some museums have only just started their work with digital services, mostly with the audience in mind, and less focus on archiving and management. Use of digital technology is more frequent in the open-air museums as far as internal communication is concerned, like communication with the public and the administrative office. Exclusively digital documentation is very unusual, most of them work traditionally, sometimes with a digital component, like for example photos. However, museums are starting to use technology to a wider extent in the documentation field, crossing the line of just the classical photo and video documentation. They do this in order to create an internal database, by making photos and compiling a file for each object, but also to communicate with the public. Digitisation enables easier access to cultural heritage documentation through the multitude of equipment and digital instruments used.

Documenting strategies in museums are more like internal procedures. Museums document things from administrative papers to specific activities related to the artifacts, constructions/reconstructions, crafts, and experiments. Most museums that digitise their documentation are working through an archival backlog of existing hard copies and historical documentation. It usually is senior staff who mainly use the infrastructure and plan for its development. Often a single person in the organisation is responsible for use of digital methods due to familiarity with computer use. Sometimes, multiple staff “do a bit of documenting” when they have time.

The documentation needs of open-air museums are not always accommodated well by existing archiving solutions, leading to highly custom-fit approaches. Museum data management platforms suffer from overly complex or obscure user interfaces, creating a learnability barrier. Conversion from hard copy records and drawings to a digital format is time consuming and tedious. Even straightforward data entry is a slow process as the data needs to be in a clean or rigid format. Support for digitisation is often not strong enough to help museums build a sustainable digital infrastructure. Instead, funding is often allocated on a per-project basis.