The Benefits of Digital Storytelling with Collections Online

Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Rachel Cristine Woody. My name is Bradley and I will be your moderator for this webinar titled The Benefits of Digital Storytelling with Collections Online.

Before we start, I would like to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions, as well as knowledge management and library automation systems. Our brands include Sydney, Presto, Argus, ArchivEra, Eloquent, and CuadraSTAR.

Now I’d like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Rachel Christine Woody. Rachel is the owner of Relicura and provides services to museums, libraries, and archives. She specializes in museum collections management systems, digitization technology, digital project management, and digital usership. During the course of her career, she has successfully launched multiple digital projects that include advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management systems. She is also a popular guest author for Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog and has provided us with many great webinars that are listed on our website. So please feel free to check those out after today’s session. Take it away, Rachel.

Thank you, Bradley. Thank you to Lucidea’s for hosting us today, and thank you for joining us on today’s topic.

This is part of a larger storytelling series so if you’ve not checked out those webinars previously they are available on Lucidea’s website.

Today we’re going to focus on the benefits of digital storytelling with our online collections And part of this is through a lens of being more aware as collection stewards, but also with a lens towards, higher or upper management if they need convincing or if you need to make a business case for why digital storytelling can be such a benefit to the collections as well as to the museum.

With that in mind, we’ll do an introduction to the benefits, review of each one we’ll get into further detail on, including ability to supplement or replace a physical exhibit, increases in engagement opportunities, expanding collection relevancy, broadening collection access, and improving elements of accessibility.

So with that we will jump into it.

So for our benefits, we’re gonna talk about supplementing or replacing physical exhibits, which will be our first one. And this is perhaps the first and most technically applicable.

As collection stewards, we see automatic impact or benefit from being able to put together exhibits and have those supplemented.

We’ll then talk about increases in engagement opportunities, and this is engagement with digital collections online and how digital storytelling specifically offers different elements of engagement for our users.

When we get into expanding collection relevancy, it’s through the lens of digital storytelling and how using collections as part of that storytelling apparatus helps to provide or helps the objects inherent inherit further relevancy, to our audience that is witnessing the story.

When When we talk about broadening collection access, that is the expansion of ability for our audience to find and use our collections online. And so for us talking about digital storytelling further increasing and broadening that access point is important to us as collection stewards who publish and make these collections available online, but also of course relevancy to the larger museum and the, knock on benefits of that.

And then, of course, accessibility, very important for us at museums and in everything we produce with our collection materials. And we’ll talk about how elements of digital storytelling naturally include and incorporate these, aspects and features of accessibility.

So for the first one, ability to supplement or replace a physical exhibit.

When we’re thinking of using digital storytelling, as we do with exhibits and have covered previously an exhibit is a story essentially that we’ve put together and produced with great physicality in our museum spaces.

Because of the physical nature of exhibits and the physical nature of the story being told there are understandable restrictions like there are the restrictions of physical space there are restrictions and what objects we’re able to use as well as just like the cost of producing something in a physical manifestation of a story.

When we’re doing a digital story while there are certainly costs and we have covered those previously, the costs in terms of that production of storytelling are way less and can help therefore either supplement an exhibit that is already, manifested in the physical space. Maybe there’s not room for everything and so we’re able to provide a bigger portion of that story online.

Or maybe it’s an exhibit for various reasons that just can’t take place in a physical space, can’t take place in your museum, and so having that digital storytelling and that digital exhibit story space allows different solutions for how to produce that. So thinking of the the transition either the supplement or the replacement of a physical exhibit with digital storytelling means that you’re not restricted by that physical space. You’re not restricted by the number of objects as well as object size or health that you’re using in your digital storytelling.

You’re not restricted by any sort of physical installation costs, especially if you’re using an existing storytelling platform that you will have access to. You’re less restricted by staff capacity. Of course staff are still involved and there’s some resources there but not to the extent of then also needing that production piece staff doing the production of the physical exhibit.

And we are less restricted in use of pure objects or sites. So being able to use digital surrogates of pure museum collections, short circuits the entire loan process as well as inherent costs to transportation of materials.

And if it’s a physical site, for example thinking of a heritage site that can’t necessarily be rebuilt or transferred into a physical museum but it can be digitally recreated even in a three d rendering to be the setting for that digital story. So there’s a great deal of flexibility that can happen when we’re using a digital story either to supplement or replace that physical exhibit and there’s a number of different challenges that it can short circuit or work around with that different sort of setting. So it tends to be the first one that we chat about because as collection stewards and people who put together physical exhibits it can be a really nice and creative solution to have as we approach these different types of projects.

So the next one increases engagement opportunities.

Digital storytelling in the format that it takes lends itself to incorporating a variety of different storytelling engagement features.

The most common and the one that we’ll focus on today is the feature of multi vocal storytelling.

For those not familiar with multi vocal it means multiple voices in a story. So that could be multiple perspectives that can be the literal meaning of perhaps there are six different characters that you’re following through a particular exhibition on a historical event for example.

But being able to capture the different perspectives the different voices as it were of a particular event or activity that your exhibit is exploring.

And so when we have multiple points of storytelling and especially when offering different perspectives or different backgrounds on a particular event or thing, it helps to capture a broader range of attention because there are you have increased your odds essentially of having at least one of those voices connect with your audience.

It could be even multiple voices connecting but it helps to capture a broader range of attention.

Also with multi-vocal storytelling, with the complexity of different stories, different perspectives, it makes the story richer. That is why we do tend to use it in our physical exhibits as well. That’s why it is used in storytelling in general and so having it as a feature of our digital storytelling is just a natural element of enriching that story for you.

Then also it builds that more complex story so makes it richer it’s more complex helps to consider different interpretations of particular events. This is becoming more and more important as we grapple with tough topics and in challenging times And it also increases potential for connection and empathy which is also very important in general but very important currently in these more chaotic and challenging times. Having the multi vocal approach much as it helps to connect and broaden that connection, it increases the potential for the empathy that one can feel as people learn more or experience the digital storytelling, story that you are telling.

Collection relevancy.

So collection relevancy specifically before we talk about the expansion piece is how the collection is relevant to the story told. So for us as collection stewards, that’s usually the thing we think of first in terms of caretakers of collection. We wanna make sure the collections are used and utilized and featured in stories in a way that makes sense, but also as much as possible usually.

And then how can collections online rank in search engine optimization?

So different form of relevancy being the the technical idea of relevance.

As more objects are used in digital storytelling, it tends to increase the amount of times they show up online, which increases their, search engine optimization score, which referred to as SEO. And this is typically what informs Google to search result relevancy. So this is that technical relevancy. The more the collections are used in meaningful ways and the more they are proliferated online, the more relevant they are in search results.

And then also how relevant the museum is to its audience. And so this is perhaps, it’s something that we have in mind as collection caretakers, but it’s not maybe the first thing we think of. But it is gonna be the first thing that any of the upper management thinks of in terms of how is this digital storytelling helping to make our museum more broadly relevant to a larger audience. And so relevancy on that broader scale is just as important and is also happening when we’re doing meaningful digital storytelling.

So the benefits of expanding that collection relevancy in those few different relevancy ways is it increases foot traffic and that is both online foot traffic to our collections as well as physical foot traffic to the museum.

We know from past studies that people tend to research and visit the museum’s website before they then plan a trip to visit the actual physical museum. So we know there’s a direct tie there in terms of what they see online to then determining that they are going to visit the museum.

With that also is membership numbers. We know that the more a visitor engages even if it’s just online engagement increases their chances of museum membership even for people who are not necessarily hyper local to the museum.

Also we know that it can increase the potential for donors and funding as we increase collection relevancy and the relevancy of the museum, the more persuasive a case we can make with donors and funding and using functions such as digital storytelling to help make that case.

And it can help with civic and school partnerships. So knowing that digital storytelling helps build connection, helps to make, make empathy, it helps to increase collection relevancy. This can all aid in civic and school partnerships, especially if they weren’t already previously formed for you and the museum.

For broadening collection access, we know when we put collections online that that is, like, the first major step to getting our collections out there because there is only so much of the collections that can be shown in the actual museum on display. And we also know that even if the objects are on display in the physical museum, there is still an international audience that could potentially see our collections by publishing on them online.

And then making that further step of creating meaningful stories and having a digital storytelling platform that utilizes our object collections we are further broadening that access and the benefits from that of course is published for public enjoyment so not only spreading educational materials but also joy of learning joy of discovery within our collections. So there’s multiple different aspects of this but published for public enjoyment is sort of our umbrella for that.

We know it offers multiple points of access so some of our users are familiar with our collections management database and that they can search online others aren’t and so offering different points of access can be more approachable for different brains. It can also mean that it offers just multiple technical avenues of access as well.

Then it delivers possible new meanings or interpretations so broadening that collection access exposes greater amount of information a greater amount of opportunity for our audience to engage with our collection and the information contained therein. And so having new meanings or interpretations on their part is yet another benefit.

It can increase number of opportunities available for meaningful engagement so especially knowing that only so many people can make it to our physical museum knowing that they can access and reach at least a portion of our collections and digital stories helps to further that number of opportunities for engagement.

And then finally just a general deepening of both understanding and appreciation for the collection materials through this digital storytelling and through this ability to more broadly connect and provide access to our collections.

And for the accessibility piece when we’re remixing our collections content and exhibit content if we’re remixing an exhibit into a digital story it will offer the content in different delivery forms which can be incredibly helpful for different brains and different bodies in how a person wants to interact with our materials.

So offers increased accessibility, story and collection content. It provides choices for how someone may wish to experience a story or how they need to experience a story and it improves collection discovering use overall because they’re given different choices of how things are presented or how they wish to engage.

More specifically with digital storytelling these two elements tend to be the biggest accessibility capital a markers and so when we’re looking at digital storytelling the multimedia performance of text element of digital storytelling can be, very helpful in terms of broadening that accessibility element to something that otherwise would be written text. So knowing that we could have that remixed into maybe the editorial input can be incredibly helpful from an accessibility perspective.

And then sort of on the reverse side of images or any sort of visuals having text to describe these visuals or remixing visuals and providing information in a different way other than through eyesight.

So with our digital storytelling we tend to use a few different modalities of how we are delivering story information and the more thoughtful we are about how we offer those different modalities or different options for how to engage the more accessible our content and our story will be and accessible in a like capital a accessibility.

So to wrap us up we had an introduction to the different storytelling benefits specifically with our digital storytelling.

We got into the ability to supplement or replace a physical exhibit which tends to be the first thing that we think of as collection stewards. We then got into increasing engagement opportunities with the digital story but also with our collections.

We got into expansion of collection relevancy and the different ways a collection or museum can be made more relevant through a digital story activity.

We covered the broadening of collection access and so through digital storytelling how our collections are even more opened up and accessible to our community and when we then got into a few different ways digital storytelling offers improvements on accessibility of the content and information. So accessibility with a capital a in this regard in terms of offering the information in different ways that different brains and different bodies can engage with.

Before I let you go, Lucidea and I have partnered on a book that has been released, the discovery game changer museum collections data enhancement.

So for data folks and even if you’re not necessarily a data person specifically, this book is a great introduction to how we can think about our data and enhancing it in ways that makes our collection more relevant. So sort of one of the the themes of our conversation today, this takes a look at your data, in a more detailed way perhaps and how we can broaden access in different ways. So, the City of Press is offering free copies, and you can get it at the website below.

And with that, I’ll turn it back over to Bradley.

Thank you, Rachel, for the wonderful presentation. And to our audience, if you’d like to learn more about our museum collections management system called Argus, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales at lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

If you have any more questions on any of our software or our company, our contact details are listed on the screen, and please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to this series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today, and until next time. Thank you.