Introduction
Technology can improve the link between cultural institutions and audiences who are unable to visit, whether due to disability or geographical remoteness.
Here are two examples of digital strategies adopted by small and medium-sized cultural institutions to reach out to more remote audiences.
360° virtual museum tours : the example of the French association Musées en Centre Val de Loire
The French association Musées en Centre Val de Loire is a network of 60 museums, located in the Centre Val de Loire region in France.
In recent years, the association has called on public funding to create 360° virtual tours of its museums.
These 360° virtual tours are available:
- on the association’s website
- 1 to 3 touch-screen tablets are also available on site for people with reduced mobility
They are accompanied by:
- videos with English subtitles, highlighting certain aspects of the building or collections
- some museums also offer “Easy-to-Read” labels
Limitations:
- as permanent displays change more and more frequently, virtual tours can quickly become obsolete
- hiring a creative agency to film and edit virtual tours is expensive (10-15k€), so the association bought its own 360° camera…
- … but editing takes a long time too
- some museum teams have difficulty managing the time needed to provide additional content
Improvements:
- the association has decided to concentrate on temporary exhibitions, as they are shorter to photograph and edit
- in future, the association hopes to adapt to the specific needs of each museum, rather than applying the same formula to all
Visitor profile:
- from January 1st to December 17th 2024, 19,193 virtual visits were recorded on the association’s website
- 33% of online visitors come from China
- 22% of visitors come from the United States
- 17% from France
- 3% from Hungary
- for many local museums, this is an interesting form of visibility
- for some museums, it’s a big coup: added to the number of on-site visitors, online visitors to the Musée de l’histoire du Perche in Nogent-le-Rotrou represent around 1 in 7 visitors!
Mixing off-site and online visitors to broaden a museum’s audience through a multi-digital strategy: the example of carton voyageur – Musée de la carte postale
Le Carton voyageur is a museum with a collection of 120,000 postcards, located in Baud, Brittany. Since it opened in 1996, the museum’s aim has been to make its vast collection accessible to all, and to prove that the postcard is not a boring subject, hence its desire to embrace modernity with the help of new technologies and pop-culture.
Online collections:
- 1990s: digitization of the collection on CD-ROM
- 2000s: first online database
- today: the Cartolis database is open to all
- time required to add an artifact to the database: approximately 7 minutes
- around 100 postcards added every week
- no specific target groups. Users include postcard enthusiasts as well as documentalists and historians
Digital partnerships at different levels to address different audiences:
- on Bretania, an online platform about cultural collections in Brittany
- 2019: partnership with Google Arts and Culture
- 13,000 postcards downloaded on this platform
- the museum team regularly works on this platform to produce new virtual exhibitions
Innovative partnerships:
- le carton voyageur has joined creative agency AR[t] Studio’s application, BavAR[t]
- this is an augmented reality platform based on the famous Pokemon’Go game
- during the Paris Olympics (2024), users were able to access a virtual exhibition on postcards and sport in the 1900s by finding objects from the collections of the carton voyageur in augmented reality in Olympics sites.
Limits and considerations:
- although it’s a lot of work to regularly post new content on these platforms to keep them alive
- ongoing projects such as applications involve regular revisions during the development process
- but in the end, museum staff are satisfied with these partnerships which participate to build the institution’s identity
- as a result, online visibility has become a real concern when it comes to developing new partnerships