Who we are

The Working Group for Digital Strategy Development is a permanent Working Group of CIDOC.

 

Aims

Digital change is one of the major challenges for museums in the 21^st century. While many museums are already making great efforts to face this challenge in various fields of activities, such as digitization, online visibility, or digital collection management, comprehensive approaches are still widely missing. This shortage of broad digital strategies may result in inefficiencies, poorly defined priorities, and wasted resources.

We believe a museum’s digital strategy is the planning for all digital assets, resources, activities and tools that efficiently and effectively serve its institutional goals. (Definition)

A Digital Strategy should outline how and why a museum creates digital assets, and the resources and tools used to manage and provide access to these.

In order to be fit for purpose, a digital strategy should be based on the evaluation
+ of a museum’s state of digital development
+ and the different needs within the institution.

It is to be updated frequently in order to stay responsive to
+ changes within the museum,
+ the digital universe and
+ audience expectations or needs.

In the long term, we recommend to make digital strategy development a part of the general museum strategy.(Requirements)

 

What we do

The purpose of the Digital Strategy Development Working Group is to produce material and guidelines that can help museums with the process of developing a digital strategy. This will include a sample digital strategy, check-lists, and information sheets, designed to help museums identify the key issues and find appropriate solutions. This material will also help to draw the attention of museum planners to the work of other CIDOC Working Groups (Digital Preservation, Museum Process Implementation, CRM, or LIDO, etc.). The Digital Strategy Development Working Group will be responsible for maintaining and updating the material they produce and making sure it addresses the varied needs of all stakeholders: museum management, fundraisers, collections and restoration, documentation, public relations, researchers, and the museum’s target audiences.

 

Plan of Action for the next three years

We have organized the Working Group in three teams, which will lay the basis for the Working Group’s further work. First analytical results are expected in September 2020. Ready-to-use materials are to be presented to the committee in September 2021. Materials will be subject to discussions and timely updates.

 

The three teams are:

 

– Team Stakeholder Analysis (analyzing expectations from museum professionals and museum audiences towards a museum’s digital strategy)
– Team Assessment and Observation (collecting and comparing existing digital strategies)
– Team Checklist (observing the work of the other CIDOC Working Groups and the digital universe that surrounds us; listing must-have and nice-to-have items that should or could be addressed in the process of digital strategy development)

Contact

Jan Behrendt, Chair, wg-dsd(at)jan-behrendt.de, Militärhistorisches Museum (Berlin), Germany
Krisztián Fonyodi, Co-Chair, kfonyodi(at)gmail.com, Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest), Hungary

History
The Working Group was founded during the CIDOC 2018 conference in Heraklion, Greece. The first year was used to find a common understanding of what we understand a digital strategy (see definition above) and to structure the working group. During the ICOM Triennial Conference 2019 in Kyoto, the three teams Stakeholder Analysis, Assessment/Observation and Checklist Development were formed.