Digital struggles and lots of non-digital questions

Almost a year ago I started my work for the education department. Boijmans (both the collection and the office) was about to move out from its well established beautiful building. Everybody was bracing themselves to continue to work in a very uncertain future. Reading back earlier experiences by others in this blog I am reminded that transitional times like these, raise the importance of sharing knowledge resources within an organisation. If we see Boijmans as a collective of museum workers, how do we retain all their knowledge and the valuable data and content that was accumulated over the years, while going through all these changes?

In the beginning of 2019, one of the first projects I got involved in, set the goal to save the walls of the old museum building in a 360-degree digital space. Even though as a newbie I knew little about the building, I felt a big responsibility in archiving its atmosphere and the final collection presentation, before it closed its doors for at least seven years. My colleagues and I found it important to have at least an online navigable copy of the space where visitors could still get a sense of the museum and its collection.

Before closing the museum doors, all of us who worked in the shades of the office, could always stand up from our desk and walk into the exhibition space through a backdoor to get a physical sense of the museum and our engagement with the audience. Where does all that planning and collaboration behind the scenes actually end up? What kind of interaction does it generate? Boijmans employees could look for these answers anytime they wanted by checking out the exhibition space. We could see with our own eyes for example which artworks were the audience’s favourites and check how many of the info tablets were in use (as we did regularly during the exhibition nederland ⇄ bauhaus). I saw among my colleagues that this daily engagement meant a lot to them and it will be quite a challenge to keep up with this practice from our temporary office space overlooking the Erasmus bridge. Naturally, not the building but these everyday check-ups with the audience were making up a very strong cement within the organization.

My colleagues and I working on digital education, are trying to tackle this physical distance in different ways, for example by volunteering as an assistant for the Boijmans in de Klas program (bringing real art to the classroom). Also, we are answering all the questions the audience asks us via the ‘Ask us anything’ option on our collection website. This functionality is forever flowing, offering sometimes difficult, sometimes very entertaining questions. The ‘Ask us anything’ function is an obviously vivid digital chamber (1,293 questions answered so far!) where people can engage with all the digitised artworks on the Boijmans website and get answers to their questions from even the most expert museum curator.