All Arts and Culture organizations, regardless of their size, deserve robust digital services to manage their collections.
We take our experiences from working in larger organizations and refine them to meet the needs of smaller museums and archives.
We do this within a three-part framework we call Secure | Organize | Share.
Secure
Whether your content is born digital or born BCE, our first action is to ensure its safe-keeping before moving forward with other work. We start to keep your collections safe with these steps:
- Audit digital storage, physical locations, and external resources.
- Produce an inventory of your devices, services holding to your collection data.
- Align your digital records with your collection holdings and identify the gaps for the next phase.
- Define scheduled backups using local, network, and remote storage.
Organize
Now that we know where your digital holdings are, the next question is what do you have in hand? During this phase, we may ask some or all of the following questions:
- Are there schemas, taxonomies already in place?
- Is the media in optimal resolutions and formats?
- What condition is everything in?
- Are you accurately tracking condition, location, provenance, valuation, rights and other key data points to administer your holdings?
- What infrastructure and systems are required to publish collections online?
With answers, we will bring order to your materials through analysis of your holdings, focusing your metadata scheme, and standardizing your workflows.
In the process, you may need to select a new platform or just refine your current configuration for your team to manage your collection effectively over time. Either way, we are here to help you make those decisions.
Share
We help you tell your stories by creating public-facing online access to your holdings for your stakeholders, your members, and your community-at-large. In the process, we continue to improve internal collection management processes.
As we go through this final phase, we ask these questions to focus the narrative of your online exhibits and along them with your physical spaces.
- How will users, such as the public, researchers, community, interact with the collections?
- How does the digital system enhance physical collection management?
- What narratives and community stories can now be told?
- How can your public-facing content enhance our organizational programming in support of events, tours, lectures, and other activities?
- How will you use metrics to measure interest and refine your narrative?
The end result is an alignment of your digital content with your ongoing programming, creating opportunities to make new narratives and find new audiences for your holdings.
With each engagement, we tailor Secure | Organize | Share to a specific client organization and its culture. When you are ready, let’s talk about how it can be applied to your challenges, goals, and timelines.