Benitta MacLachlan is featured in the May/June 2025 issue of Museum magazine, where she shares expert insights on how museums can use technology to make their collections more accessible, engaging, and searchable.
At the start of 2024, I shared three forecasts for museums regarding digital programs, AI, and burnout in the museum industry. This post recaps the specifics of my forecast and how those areas actually evolved over the course of 2024.
Let’s look at the numbers and consider taking inspiration from what our visitors are most interested in. This demand-driven approach can be incredibly informative and can offer fodder for stories in perpetuity.
Collections online offer multiple benefits for storytelling including greater flexibility and cost effectiveness around budgets and staff time.
Storytelling with online collections is impactful, whether we choose online-only or as part of a hybrid approach to museum exhibitions.
Digitizing museum collections introduces new and engaging opportunities for storytelling. By leveraging digital surrogates—essentially online representations of physical objects—museums can enhance how they present narratives and information to audiences.
Storytelling with museum collections online allows for a great degree of flexibility, offers additional detail, and lends a dynamism that is difficult to produce within a physical exhibition.
Last week we reviewed how archives can enhance museum collections online. This week will continue our work with an examination of specific examples, including what items different types of archives may contain and where to capture this data.
One of the wonderful things about museums is that the learning never stops. There are always projects, exhibits, and programs in development that serve as constant instigators of research.
This month’s series focuses on the enhancement of museum object data using “hidden” troves of information. Hidden is in quotes because the information exists and often is not hidden—it just hasn’t been gathered for inclusion in the museum Collections Management System (CMS).
Standard museum cataloging leverages the usual set of fields that are considered best practice. We tend to refer to this information as “the tombstone information,” meaning it is clear and concise in communicating the “need to know” information.
Museum professionals can take a number of actions to prepare for funding opportunities; here is a game plan from a museum expert and consultant
Museum collections management systems (CMS) like Argus are used to make collections accessible to digital visitors and improve museum workflow.
What is a museum? What are museum jobs? What is a museum collections management system? Basics of museums, what they do, what makes them successful.
Rather than discuss Lucidea’s solutions advantages over SharePoint I’d like to share one very powerful differentiator: date handling & date searching.