eCulture Seminar 2024

01 October 2024

In September, the 8th annual eCulture Seminar was held, organized by KulturIT! This year, the seminar took place at the beautiful Maihaugen, part of the Lillehammer Museum Foundation.

KulturIT is a company that offers digital solutions for management and dissemination to museums and cultural heritage institutions in Norway and Sweden. See KulturIT’s website here.

Julie from Øksnes Museum shares news and her impressions from this years eCulture seminar.

As the only participant from Museum Nord, I chose to focus on communication solutions, and gather inspiration for how we can improve our digital communication in the future, and how we can work to engage volunteers in our work. 

This was a very eventful seminar, and it is difficult to summarize everything! Thus, I will only share some main points that I would like to take further:

Virtual Experiences and DigitaltMuseum School

Now you can add both digital and physical school programs to DigitaltMuseum. Check it out here: DigitaltMuseum Skole.

Here school programs are filtered based on subjects, grades, and curriculum goals, and it’s possible for classes to sign up via a form. Perhaps this can be used to prepare students in advance of a visit, or to obtain input or test their knowledge afterwards?

You can also create purely digital educational experiences, which the Aluminum Museum showed us an example of. See their experience and more here: Virtual experiences – DigitaltMuseum.

Gitte Bastiansen from Museum Vest gave a presentation about the Museum Pilot (Museumslosen): A website that was created to make it easier for schools and kindergartens to find museum programs that suited them. Now DigitaltMuseum School can fill this role.

Many of us work with schools and kindergartens, but there can be big differences from museum to museum when it comes to how many people make use of what the museums offer, and how involved we are with schools. In order to create connections between museums of Norway and share experiences, Museum Vest has started a digital forum for those of us working with schools and kindergartens.

Thursday friends and volunteering in the museum

In the Museum Report of 2021: Trust, Things, Time, volunteering is emphasized as an important part of museum work. We were introduced to several examples of volunteering in registration work during the seminar.

In the Lillehammer Museum Foundation’s initiative; Thursday Friends, a group of volunteers get to use the museum’s premises to do simple registration work. These volunteers are selected based on their good digital skills and understanding of reference management and use of sources, and they all have different backgrounds and competences. They come by every Thursday, and have clear tasks.

This requires good facilitation and preparation for the employees, so that each volunteer finds the work interesting, meaningful and enjoyable. In addition, the volunteers receive certain benefits such as lunch at each visit, and they do other social things together.

The way they have engaged volunteers has been successful, and we can take inspiration from this.

For those interested, Museum Nord has registered and published a total of 42,000 objects on DigitaltMuseum! See the full collection here.

Rebus race in KulturPunkt

With KulturPunkt, you can create cultural trails outdoors; For example in a sculpture park, or on a museum area. See which trails are available in KulturPunkt today here: KulturPunkt

Now you can also enter questions and “lock” posts, which can be used, for example, to get a linear story where you have to follow the course, or to arrange a rebus race or a treasure hunt!

Summarized

I think it was very relevant – and not least fun – to join this seminar! This gave me inspiration and ideas for our own digital and educational work.

As the seminar was held in Eastern Norway, there were unfortunately not that many Northern Norwegian museums represented. Therefore, it was important that someone from us had the opportunity to travel to be able to represent Museum Nord, share experiences and make contacts in museum Norway.

Finally, I would like to share some photos and clips from the seminar, including when we got a tour of the open-air museum Maihaugen. This is one of the country’s oldest and largest open-air museums, with over 100 buildings, including Garmo Stave Church.

Thanks to KulturIT and the Lillehammer Museum Foundation for an exciting and useful seminar!

Sprinkling of images

Short video from Maihaugen