Digital Prospects for Inclusive Civic Historic Museums

'Digital Prospects for Inclusive Historic Museums' builds a network of expertise between small museums that are thinking in big and influential ways about community participation in museum spaces and how it is facilitated through digitisation of their collections, their interpretation materials and display. 'Digital Prospects for Inclusive Historic Museums' takes place across three organizations, two in England and one in the United States, all of which are working in historic buildings with local communities. Each institution has foregrounded its community relationships in its daily work, and this project supports these organizations as they explore new initiatives to evolve their digital interactions in this context. The projects will explore how activities mediated by digital platforms can extend beyond the usual aims of increasing access, or democratizing knowledge, to embed reciprocity and respect for the physical, cultural and emotional engagement that exists between museums and their audiences.

At the core of the project is the creation and testing of a variety of new projects in digital formats. At the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea, an artist will create an artwork which will allow participants to interact with digital recordings to co-produce a new work that explores digital and material space, place and belonging. The Peale Center in Baltimore is creating an exhibition which maximizes interactions with disabled visitors and enables them to generate new material for the Peale's collection through digital recording tools. At the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton, the project will develop content for an activity that will encourage engagement with the creative and calming properties of the popular Pavilion Gardens. Each of these projects will advance our understanding of how digital materials can be used to support caring and respectful relationships between museums and their audiences, and allow the researchers and professionals involved to share the outcomes with each other and with regional and international professional networks.

We also aim to develop the way that we think about the value of this kind of work, and to reflect on how we evaluate it. Consideration and respect are aspects of digital interactions that are not easy to measure using recognized processes such as counting users or 'likes' or visits, so the project will also include reflection on the processes of evaluation and the ways in which we can better understand and describe the important principles in developing new museum content of this kind.

The main impact of this project will be to capture elements of best practice in relation to fostering inclusion and participation through digital interfaces for museum display and interpretation. DigiPiCH will work with questions of sensory access; of participation and co-production; and with the relationship between digital provision and physical space to create and test new models that will inform sector developments, through our project's already established excellent professional networks in digital museums practice.

The DigiPiCH project makes the civic, historic museum a focus of the research into digital interfaces and community engagement. The specific conditions of the civic historic museum in terms of developing belonging, widening participation and access are addressed in the design of the projects (including staff exchange to highlight issues of locality and the barriers to access presented by the built environment). Issues of sustainability and the values of smaller museums with locally-oriented collections and programmes will be addressed in the project outcomes.

The project will contribute to the development of evaluation methods in the participating institutions, and through publications of outcomes, in the practices of evaluation of digital programmes and social inclusion/well-being initiatives in museums. The project will include training and use of the UCL Well Being Measures toolkit for the participating partners, but will also begin to develop a critique of methods of evaluation that focus solely on the individual visitor. These propositions will be disseminated as part of the published outcomes for the project and have the potential to enhance evaluation processes that are promoted by organizations such as the Arts Council and other funding bodies, who are increasingly concerned to introduce and evaluate the arts for well-being.

The project also realizes several outputs that will themselves impact on the engagement between the participating partners and their audiences. We estimate that around 200 visitors will be directly involved in the activities that are being delivered within the DigiPiCH programme and that the word of mouth/remote access/legacy activities will be accessed by thousands.