Art Online: Transformations in Digitisation and Discoverability of University Art Museum Collections
Stephen V. Graham
Abstract: Many Australian universities have significant art collections located in museums on campus. Although these cultural institutions may be showcased on the university website, online access to the artworks themselves is quite often limited. My research investigates this assumption, identifying how much content is digitised and examining different ways one cohort of universities – the twenty-one member universities of University Art Museums Australia (UAMA) – enables the online visibility and discoverability of objects within their art collections.
The research investigates strategies deployed by universities to reveal the richness and diversity of their collections:
How do university art museums harness the digital environment to display their collections and increase their discoverability?
How do these cultural institutions extend and explore the creative and interpretive potential of their art collections online?
It is no less important to assess the reasons why university art museums have not been able to (or chosen not to) digitise their collections:
What are the most significant challenges today to digitising artworks in the collections?
The research has unearthed a number of findings. In terms of the digitisation of collections, the research shows that only one third of University Art Museums (UAMs) have comprehensive and searchable online collections. In terms of enhancing discoverability, thematic structuring of online collections has been adopted by the majority of universities. UAMs also look to value-add to these collections by deploying contextual or interpretive information, expanding metadata to increase search capability, and integrating object-based learning as a model for increasing educational value of the collection. Finally, the research has also shown that Covid 19, copyright, staffing and financial considerations have been the major challenges for digitisation projects.
About: Stephen Valambras Graham is a reference librarian at the University of South Australia (UniSA), supporting the teaching, learning and research activities of the University. Stephen was recipient of the 2021 ALIA Prize for Master of Information Management at UniSA. Stephen is also a trained art historian, a writer and independent scholar, and was awarded the History Council of South Australia’s 2022 Wakefield Press Essay Prize.
