Discovering art online: Digitising university art museum collections

Stephen Valambras Graham

Introduction

Gaining access to text-based resources via online platforms is becoming the rule rather than the exception in universities across Australia. University library catalogues, scholarly databases, and subscription-based and open-access journals are all pathways for retrieving resources and information online. In addition to text-based content, many Australian universities are the custodians of substantial art collections. These physical holdings are often managed by art museums or galleries attached to the university and are on display across different sites at the university. Diverse two- or three-dimensional image-based objects, including paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and multimedia artworks, may be represented in these collections, reflecting the cultural memory and cultural activities of the university. As Andrew Simpson points out, university collections are often regarded as a statement of institutional identity and serve the aspirations of the university community.¹

A review in 2010 identifying more than 400 university museums and collections in Australia indicated ‘a sharp increase in the number of art collections’ in recent years.² In the context of a strong emphasis today on exhibitions and public programming, as well as a reappraisal of the value of object-based learning (OBL) and teaching in relevant disciplines, art museums in tertiary institutions have clearly become a significant asset.³ Indeed, university art museums (UAMs) also serve important functions that support and underpin academic research, interdisciplinary collaboration and cultural diversity, as well as contributing to the cultural life of the university.

Universities like to showcase their cultural institutions online; however, the artworks within university collections are not always visible or discoverable. UAMs in Australia and internationally are now repositioning themselves by offering increased access to physical holdings and, simultaneously, ‘embellishing or interpreting [the experience] through the virtual’.⁴ Digitisation strategies could contribute significantly to the performance and role of UAMs as educational institutions, cultural repositories and community resources. Yet how much content from university art collections is digitised and discoverable online? The author’s research investigates these transformations in online access, identifying the level of digitisation in university art collections and exploring the strategies deployed by universities across Australia to reveal the richness and diversity of their art collections. Research into the online visibility and discoverability of objects addressed the following questions:

• How do university art museums harness the digital environment to display their collections and increase their discoverability?
• How do these cultural institutions extend and explore the creative and interpretative potential of their art collections online?

Digital technologies are already shaping research and education in the university community. This research critically examines how UAMs can ensure that resources within their collections benefit from these developments.

It is no less important to assess the reasons why UAMs have not been able to (or have chosen not to) digitise their collections. Therefore, this article also asks:

• What are the most significant challenges today to digitising artworks in the collections?

This research investigates one cohort of universities: the 21 members of University Art Museums Australia (UAMA), a professional peak body representing art museums and galleries responsible for university-owned art collections. Contemporary artists, of course, exploit digital technology and social media platforms in the creation of works of art, but the author’s research explores the way higher education institutions that collect, safeguard and exhibit art objects have harnessed digital services and the internet.

Building on a review of current literature in the field, a mixed methods research approach, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative datasets, ensured a richer and more nuanced exploration of the data under consideration. The following mixed techniques were used:

• descriptive research recording the existing profile and features of digitised content on the cohort’s websites
• quantitative analysis of content on the websites using an open-source application
• online surveys circulated to UAM curators and managers.

Descriptive research was employed to observe and record data on the 21 UAMA members’ websites. Publicly available online information was used to help identify trends and patterns relating to the digitisation and online discoverability of objects within each university’s art collection. This research component was invaluable for understanding the current landscape and how each UAM tackled and prioritised the issue of online accessibility. The descriptive research focused on university website pages communicating information related to their art collections and excluded social media platforms, which are primarily exploited for public programming and exhibitions.

A systematic, quantitative assessment of the text-based information on the websites surveyed helped to inform and test conclusions reached in the descriptive research. Voyant Tools, a web-based application offering a number of interactive datasets, was used to perform this analysis. Relevant pages (URLs) from each of the UAM websites were uploaded into Voyant Tools, creating a corpus that could then be analysed and manipulated within different tool panels.⁵ This method describes the extent and use of words or word clusters in content on the websites that may support patterns identified in the other methodologies.

A third dataset, drawn from the results of an online participant survey, completed the research methodology. While content analysis and descriptive research are unobtrusive techniques for data collection, the online survey required human participants. A link to the online survey was circulated by email to managers and curators working within the target cohort of 21 university art collections. Fourteen respondents participated; however, four surveys were incomplete. The study received a total of 10 completed surveys from 21 universities, therefore obtaining an almost 50 per cent success rate. The survey was designed to complement the descriptive research, exploring data unavailable on the websites regarding audience engagement and digitisation policies, as well as the constraints and benefits of digitisation projects. Besides the statistical data recorded from survey responses, an evaluation of the qualitative data inputs captures the dynamics and subtleties in comments from participants, providing valuable insights and helping to identify themes across the responses.

Analysis and evaluation using the research methods described here unearthed findings that correspond to three themes:

• digitising collections
• discovering collections
• challenges and opportunities.

The article is structured according to these three themes. First, however, we will explore the broader context of image-based digitisation in the sector, and how artworks can be reinterpreted and recontextualised in the online environment.

Context

The digital representation or surrogate of a physical artwork (as opposed to born-digital works) may shape a very different viewer response in comparison with confronting the physical item on display. Cultural institutions across the broad church of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) are addressing issues relevant to the digitisation of image-based resources. An overview of these issues is provided here as well as a summary of case studies exploring digitisation projects in universities in Australia and internationally.

The GLAM sector

A report funded by CSIRO helps to set the scene for a discussion of digitisation in the GLAM sector. Entitled Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, it involved sector-wide consultation reviewing current trends and challenges in GLAM innovation.⁶ Responses to a survey underlined the importance of digitisation: in a table rating the importance of nine issues, ‘Digitising collections’ was the second highest issue recorded as ‘critical’.⁷ The report flags a number of issues that reappear in this research, including discoverability and linked data, preservation of digital material and copyright. The creative re-use of digitised content and the need to make the transition from the ‘push’ to a ‘pull’ model, in which users are engaged from the outset to ‘help pull through digitised content based on specific needs’ are also featured in the report.⁸

Des Griffin’s review of digitisation in the National Museum of Australia’s Issues in Museology webpages, the radio podcast Future Tense and Simpson’s article cited earlier all take a wide-angle lens on the discussion of online accessibility in GLAM institutions.⁹ Simpson’s thought-provoking paper on the future of university museums advocates for a reassessment of museum collections, situating these assets within the context of campus-wide education and research. Historically, Simpson argues, material items in university collections have been the source of academic research and teaching. Drawing on OBL and interdisciplinary collaboration, Simpson leaves open the question of how Australian universities can better invest in the innovative potential of ‘digital outreach’.¹⁰ Hannan, Duhs and Chatterjee also assert the ‘pedagogical power’ of OBL and how universities might acknowledge and engage with collections digitally alongside ‘traditional collections-based teaching’.¹¹

Two salient articles outline developments in museum digitisation. Andrew Bock, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, focuses on Australian institutions, while Adrian Murphy, contributing to the online sector publication Museums and Heritage, addresses the situation in the UK.¹² Bock cites statistics on the digitised coverage of collections in some of Australia’s national and state cultural institutions and points to some of the exciting opportunities offered by digitisation. The very high resolutions possible today, for example, are creating a new experience that allows viewers to zoom into paint strokes or details that cannot be seen with the naked eye. ‘This adds a connection’, writes Bock, ‘to how the artist might have seen the painting, even if it is not as they intended it to be viewed’.¹³ The review finishes with fascinating data on the top artworks viewed online in a selection of museums and galleries.

Like Bock, Murphy’s article provides a summary of cutting-edge digitisation trends in the GLAM sector. Case studies and examples across Britain, such as the ‘Collections Dive Project’ at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, build a picture of how digitisation is deployed creatively across the sector internationally.¹⁴ These examples underscore the notion that objects are not static, isolated entities but dynamic participants in the social and cultural contexts in which they exist. Digital representation expands the social life of images and objects, enabling users to engage and interact with artworks recontextualised in an online environment.

The potential for extending the research possibilities of artworks as a consequence of digital representation has also been the subject of investigation. At the National Library of Wales, the digital archive of Welsh artist John Kyffin Williams has enabled the distant reading of his oeuvre, inspired by the quantitative theory of interpretation developed by Franco Moretti.¹⁵ By attaching geo-spatial metadata to the digital surrogates of his landscape paintings, Williams’s artworks can be examined by tracing the geographical sites he depicts. This augmented layer of information, also described as geo-tagging, fosters a new understanding of the artistic imagination in the context of art historical enquiry.¹⁶

University digitisation projects

Peter Michel engages readers with a personal perspective on the digitisation experience. Drawing on his experience of digitising special collections at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Michel ruminates on the purpose of digitising, asking readers to think less about how to shift resources from print to digital than of how to harness the digital environment to enhance collections.¹⁷ Sarah Bromage, deputy curator of the art collection at the University of Stirling, describes a project that aims to provide online access to the university’s museum and archive collections.¹⁸ The project reveals the importance of integrating items held in disparate repositories across the campus into the broader digital architecture of the university. The ability to search across collections to find items that relate to the same artist/creator or theme could unlock the depth and potential for these collections to achieve synergies.¹⁹

Case studies in the literature describe the organisational workflow, priorities, metadata standards and digital preservation issues involved in digitising special collections.²⁰ At the University of Maryland, the uneven nature of digitisation workflows, as influenced by patron demand and the poor contextualisation of digital metadata make it difficult to search for related objects from different collections. Such challenges beset the establishment of an online portal to digitised repositories.²¹ Closer to home, the University of Wollongong initiated a program to tackle the digitisation of its archival collections, which includes image and text-based objects such as letters and manuscripts.²² Daly and Organ describe a ‘Digital Collections Significance Register’, a scorecard that lists collection content and rates it based on select criteria. The register, a helpful best practice framework, ‘provides a matrix for determining order of priority in planning digitisation activities’.²³

Other relevant case studies include Harkema and Avery’s study of a project digitising photographs at the University of Saskatchewan and a comprehensive digitisation project at the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.²⁴ The work undertaken at the Sheldon Museum of Art underlines the potentially time-consuming nature of digitisation workflows: matching colours, verifying provenance, purchase and copyright information, and checking metadata. Digitisation processes can be a bottleneck in an institution’s programmed online expansion. These case studies provide insight into the challenges as well as the opportunities offered by new technologies experienced firsthand and recounted by professionals in the GLAM sector.

Digitising collections

A conundrum faced by all UAMs is how to make accessible an art collection that, like the tip of an iceberg, is only visible to a small extent. Digitising the collection can overcome this dilemma. With their eye on financial considerations, art museums, as one commentator expressed it, are now using pixels rather than bricks and mortar to expand access to their collections.²⁵ A major enabler for research, scholarship and creative use is access to, and the ability to explore, online digitised collections.²⁶ Twenty-five per cent of respondents to the author’s online survey identified an increase in online visitor numbers due to expanded digitisation in the last five years. Intensifying digital activity could even translate to higher physical visitor numbers. The more content a museum puts online, maintains Suzanne Miller, former CEO at the Queensland Museum, ‘the more we find people want to connect with the real thing’.²⁷ While the ‘online museum’ may incentivise virtual visitors to step into the bricks and mortar collection, importantly, it also enables users in remote areas or with mobility issues to ‘visit’ the collection.

Digitisation and data

A snapshot of the UAMA’s ‘Survey Report 2017–2019’, available on its website, contains data in several key areas: number of artworks, number of artist exhibitions, number of visitors, number of public and education programs delivered and more.²⁸ However, the report provides no data on the extent of digitisation in UAM collections. Similarly, no information on digitisation projects can be found in an earlier benchmarking report.²⁹ In the ‘Background Information’ attached to a media release on the 2017–2019 survey, examples were provided of how UAMs were attempting to reach their audiences in response to COVID-19: exhibitions, studio tours, interviews and Zoom symposia—but not collection digitisation.³⁰ Only one example referred to a discussion and interpretation of a work in the permanent collection of the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art.³¹ The intention of this article is not to diminish the importance and relevance of these activities, which are an integral part of the core business and cultural mission of UAMs. Nevertheless, the UAMA’s Survey Report and accompanying media release could imply an inferior priority for the digital expansion of collections and the monitoring of traffic to these online collections.

This is confirmed by responses to the author’s survey question: ‘Have you identified an increase in online visitor numbers to the university art collection website?’ Over 40 per cent of respondents were unsure. One participant affirmed that they ‘do not monitor visitor numbers to [their] online collection’. There are numerous tools, Google Analytics being just one example, that can monitor and provide extensive data reporting on traffic to websites that could inform the understanding and interpretation of online usage of UAM collections.

Audience engagement

Overwhelmingly, the UAMs surveyed for this research emphasised public programming and exhibitions in gallery spaces. Writing about the UAM sector, Goddard and Salmon claim that the ‘most visible medium for external engagement is the exhibition’.³² Strategic planning and communications in UAMs, like museums elsewhere, are driven by a desire to remain relevant in their community and increase physical visitor numbers. The University of the Sunshine Coast, for example, promotes its art gallery by declaring that it ‘delivers exhibitions, programs and educational activities that are shaped by the University’s commitment to freedom of enquiry and expression’.³³ Mansfield et al. confirm in their CSIRO study that engaging new audiences is front of mind for galleries and art museums generally.³⁴ Art museums strive to navigate the digital world without compromising the fundamental role of the physical collection itself. As Frank Howarth, former director of the Australian Museum, Sydney, has said about the interface between real and virtual worlds, ‘one is not at the expense of the other’.³⁵

In a post-pandemic world, a number of UAMs have launched virtual tours of current or recent exhibitions as one strategy to maintain a cultural presence. A virtual tour of the Rite of Passage exhibition at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) integrates high-resolution 3D spatial imaging and pop-up interpretative tiles on the individual artworks and can be viewed on the QUT Art Museum website.³⁶ Faced, as we have been, with lockdowns and social distancing constraints, UAMs hope such solutions will provide something more than just a surrogate experience.³⁷

Mapping digitisation and UAM collections

The descriptive survey of UAM websites undertaken as part of this research revealed an uneven level of progress of digitisation and online collections. Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of three variables: online, partly online and not-online collections on UAM websites. The chart shows that 29 per cent of UAM websites analysed had rendered very little or none of the content from their collection online. This result aligns with the author’s survey in which 33 per cent of respondents indicated that their institution had not added artworks online from the collection.

Figure 1: UAM collections, the extent of digitisation.

Source: Author’s research.

The research identified one-third of art museums as having a significant portion of their collection digitised and accessible via a database. A breakdown of this data by UAM is contained in Table 1. Art museums with significant online collections appear in the columns headed ‘Comprehensive collection digitisation’ and ‘Catalogue/search tool’. These UAMs tend to belong to the older, established universities that have a considerable number of artworks in their collections. The largest university art collection in Australia, the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, contains over 16,000 items. Besides the sandstone universities, the list also includes more recent institutions: Monash and RMIT in Melbourne, Flinders in Adelaide and Griffith in Brisbane. RMIT University has the smallest collection in the group with 1,500 artworks. Flinders University is host to the only UAM that limits public access to its digitised collection, allowing only Flinders staff and students to consult its online catalogue.

A number of other UAMs have stated that it is their intention to digitise their collections. A statement on the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Art Collection website, echoing the ‘pull’ model of digitising content discussed above, announced that featured works represented only a small selection gleaned from the collection and invited users to recommend additions: ‘We will be adding to these highlights over time, so if there is any artwork on campus that particularly intrigues or delights you, please let us know.’³⁸ The University of the Sunshine Coast, with a relatively small collection of 850 artworks, claimed that it was striving to enhance online access to its collection ‘for students, staff, researchers, gallery and museum professionals, writers, and our community’, emphasising the open and inclusive nature of its digitisation project.³⁹

Thirty-eight per cent of the UAMs surveyed had undertaken partial digitisation of their collections; of these, UTS and UOW provided a keyword search function to help users locate artworks or related items such as exhibitions and workshops on their websites (see Table 1). However, searches for artists referred to in the collection but whose work had not been digitised yielded no results. For example, a search for Arthur Streeton, referenced in the ‘Artists in the Collection’ page on the UTS Gallery and Art Collection website, was inconclusive.

The University of Tasmania has achieved partial overall digitisation, having digitised one discrete collection, the Tyler Collection of Romanian and Modern Art. This fascinating collection has been digitised using Omeka software, an open-source web application and platform for sharing digital collections. Omeka is a Digital Scholar project produced and designed by researchers and compatible with research outputs. Artworks can be viewed by type (e.g. icons, paintings, drawings, ceramics) or can be searched or browsed using tags, keywords, specific fields, artist, location and more, demonstrating the way linked metadata can boost discoverability.⁴⁰ Figure 2, a screenshot from a search using the tags feature, illustrates the richness of the results.

Table 1: Extent of digitisation per UAM.

	University	No. of artworks	Programs/ exhibitions	Collection description	Partial collection digitisation	Comprehensive collection digitisation	Catalogue/ search tool
1	University of New South Wales	unknown	✓
2	Curtin University	unknown	✓	✓
3	Edith Cowan University	unknown	✓	✓
4	University of Western Australia	unknown	✓	✓
5	Macquarie University	unknown	✓	✓
6	La Trobe University	2,000	✓	✓
7	University of South Australia	unknown	✓	✓	✓
8	University of the Sunshine Coast	850	✓	✓	✓
9	Deakin University	2,000	✓	✓	✓
10	Charles Darwin University	3,000	✓	✓	✓
11	Queensland University of Technology	3,000	✓	✓	✓
12	University of Tasmania	3,000	✓	✓	✓		✓
13	University of Technology Sydney	unknown	✓	✓	✓		✓
14	University of Wollongong	5,000	✓	✓	✓		✓
15	Flinders University	8,000	✓	✓		✓*	✓
16	RMIT University	1,500	✓	✓		✓	✓
17	Monash University	2,700	✓	✓		✓	✓
18	Griffiths University	4,000	✓	✓		✓	✓
19	University of Queensland	4,400	✓	✓		✓	✓
20	University of Sydney	8,000	✓	✓		✓	✓
21	University of Melbourne	16,000	✓	✓		✓	✓

Source: Author’s research. *No public access.

Figure 2: Tags search (detail).

Source: Tyler Collection of Romanian and Modern Art, University of Tasmania.

Digital access plans and metadata

These are encouraging signs of the diverse yet affiliated intentions of UAMs to undertake digitisation projects and increase online accessibility to their collections. Data from the author’s survey certainly demonstrates the importance UAMs attach to increasing digital access. In responses to a question asking UAMs to nominate, in terms of their own digital access plan, their number one goal, 40 per cent of respondents chose ‘Making the collection more accessible to students, staff and/or researchers’ as their priority. However, 40 per cent of respondents also indicated that they had no formal digital implementation plan in place.

A word cloud generated from the 95 most frequent terms in the corpus of UAM webpages in Voyant Tools visually demonstrates the low frequency of words associated with digitisation. Only the term ‘online’ rated a mention, appearing 43 times across content from the 21 webpages.

The omission or paucity of terms like ‘digital’ or ‘digitisation’ should not be interpreted as an absence of digitised images; rather, it suggests that these meta-terms are redundant or superfluous in terms of user engagement on websites.

There is no shortage of resources, including guides and templates, for the development of digital access plans available for cultural institutions wishing to digitise their collections. The Australian Museums and Galleries Association offers detailed information on digital strategies, digitisation, preserving born-digital content, and how to contribute collections to Trove, the National Library of Australia’s online discovery service.⁴¹ GLAM Peak, a peak body for the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector in Australia, also has a strong focus on digital access. Its Digital Access to Collections project includes digital access plans and a toolkit offering practical steps for small to medium-sized institutions on ‘collecting digital items, undertaking digitisation, and providing online access to their collections’.⁴²

Another question in the author’s online survey sought information on the metadata, in particular, the controlled vocabularies or thesauri adopted by UAMs to populate their subject headings. A strong proportion of UAMs indicated familiarity with the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (62.5 per cent), while the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies place, name and subject thesauri also rated a mention.

To complete this section, a detailed case study is made of one UAM’s digital archive: the University Art Collection at the University of Sydney.

Case study: University of Sydney University Art Collection

A search tool is available for users to search the database for digitised items. The University Art Collection at the University of Sydney contains more than 8,000 works including paintings, sculptures and ceramics and is part of the Chau Chak Wing Museum. The University Art Collection shares a database with three other university collections: the Macleay Collections (natural history, ethnography and science), the Nicholson Collection (antiquities and archaeology) and works by the modernist artist J. W. Power from the Power Collection.⁴³ The website’s ‘advanced search’ feature offers diverse options to choose from (see Figure 3).

Besides an object search, the database offers additional pathways that provide contextual information pertaining to items searched:

• ‘Stories’ enables searches for in-depth information about artworks
• ‘Exhibitions’ enables searches for information about exhibitions that featured artworks
• ‘People’ enables searches for information about people associated with artworks.

Figure 3: Advanced search tool.

Source: Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

Figure 4: Object record (detail), Jeffrey Smart, Study for Coogee Baths—Winter.

Source: Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

A search for artist Jeffrey Smart using the ‘stories’ option reveals multiple results including an article on the Roddy Meagher Bequest, which includes a reference to Smart. These search pathways, cross-matching data units with different keywords in the database, open new research possibilities for users. Figure 4 shows the object record for a Jeffrey Smart work.

Comprehensive catalogue entries for each individual work in the collection are provided. Figure 5 shows the additional information from Smart’s Study for Coogee Baths—Winter.

Clicking on the thumbnail image opens a high-resolution version with zoom capacity. While images can be saved from the catalogue, all are accompanied by the following copyright notice:

Copyright the artist. This image is provided for research purposes only and must not be reproduced for other purposes without the prior permission of Chau Chak Wing Museum, the University of Sydney and the copyright holder.

Some object records also include a second image of the artwork with its frame or, for works on paper (for example), of images that may appear on the reverse side. On the University Art Collection website, multiple entry points into the collection are provided. These include links to a selection of individual artists such as Smart, Margaret Preston, Russell Drysdale and others, and tiles divided thematically into Aboriginal, Australian, East Asian and European art with introductions to subject areas and links to relevant object records.

Figure 5: Object record (detail), Jeffrey Smart, Study for Coogee Baths—Winter.

Source: Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.

Although it is possible to search using the ‘on display’ filter, there is little information on the webpages about what artworks are currently on physical display in the Chau Chak Wing Museum or elsewhere on campus. Users are reminded that this ‘Collections Search is a work in progress’, although there is no indication of exactly how many works from the collection have so far been digitised and put online.⁴⁴ A search, for example, for Conway Hart’s portrait of Francis Forbes (c. 1850) in the collection (Museum Number: UA1851.1), referred to in a story record ‘The Art of Portraiture’, could not be retrieved.

Discovering collections

One of the key issues in terms of presenting online collections, according to Mitchell Whitelaw, is the need to improve our use of the technologies and tools at our disposal and provide a better design for ‘exposing the rich content in the digital collection’.⁴⁵ Devising appropriate thematic categories is certainly one strategy widely adopted by UAMs offering partial and comprehensive online collections. This is a particularly useful strategy for the cohort of UAMs that does not have an integrated search tool, as it can provide users with a panoptic, albeit selective, view of the collection content.

Thematic structuring

While only a third of art museums provide online collections with a searchable database, over two-thirds showcase highlights or selections from their collection. These digitally curated selections are often structured thematically in a combination of four broad areas. Individual works are crossmatched where categories overlap: an Aboriginal bark painting, for example, might appear in a bequest as well as the subject category ‘Aboriginal art’. These categories, and the UAMs having adopted one or more of them, are:

• bequests/donations (e.g. the Stuartholme-Behan Collection at the University of Queensland): Griffith, Queensland, Sunshine Coast, Flinders, Tasmania, Melbourne
• subject (e.g. Aboriginal art; political posters; East Asian art; European prints; individual artist): Sydney, Wollongong, Charles Darwin, Griffith, Sunshine Coast, Flinders, RMIT, Tasmania
• highlights (selection of works): Sydney, Wollongong, UTS, QUT, Flinders, RMIT, Melbourne, Monash
• mapping (e.g. geo-localising sculptures on campus, artworks on display): Wollongong (sculptures), UTS, QUT, Sunshine Coast, Flinders, Deakin, Monash, UniSA.

This categorisation helps to articulate a structure and provide users with an understanding of the scope, depth and thematic diversity of a collection. It corresponds to access points from which users can enter to discover and explore a collection.

Case study: Mapping artworks across campus

Eight of the UAM websites surveyed present digital versions of artworks that are visible around the campus as well as contextual information and directions to locate the works. Examples from Deakin University Art Gallery and from the Samstag Museum at the University of South Australia (UniSA) demonstrate two strategies for presenting online artworks from their respective collections that are dispersed across campus sites. Deakin University has adopted the izi.TRAVEL app to build self-guided tours that combine audio guides, images and interpretative content that can also be downloaded and easily viewed on mobile phones. The Deakin University Sculpture Walk, Burwood, contains 27 featured artworks. Alongside the tour content are icons identifying the locations at the Burwood campus in Google Maps.⁴⁶ According to UniSA, approximately 50 artworks are on display around its campuses and 11 works are presented online.⁴⁷ The photographs provided for each sculpture, painting or installation have been taken in situ, which assists in identifying their locations, and supplementary information is provided about the artwork, artist and location on campus. In the case of the donation of works from artist Sydney Ball on display at the Sir Eric Neal Library, Mawson Lakes Campus, a link is provided to a PDF brochure with detailed information on the Sydney Ball Gift.

Photographing, digitising and presenting works—often sculptures—located around campus has the advantage of enabling users to discover and experience the interplay of art and its environment. As Macquarie University Art Gallery communicates, art is:

on display in the library, the faculties, the hospital, the clinics, and the administration buildings, where staff, students and visitors collectively encounter art as part of the everyday life of Macquarie’s expansive campus.⁴⁸

Value adding to collections

‘Digitisation could generate whole new ways of telling stories with objects’, reflects Martha Sear from the National Museum of Australia. She argues that we are ‘on the threshold of new ways of connecting knowledge’.⁴⁹ The landscape paintings layered with geo-spatial metadata at the National Library of Wales and the user-centric interface in the Collections Dive Project at the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, referred to earlier, are indeed generating new digitally induced stories.

In Australia, there are also signs of UAMs developing ideas that add value to the online collections they display. At Monash University’s Museum of Art (MUMA), an innovative project titled 100 Works of the Monash University Collection offers 100 digitised artworks accompanied by commissioned texts from art historians, curators and artists. According to the MUMA website, the aim of the project is:

to open the Collection up to a broad range of voices and perspectives—from those who have had close contact with it over five decades, to those new to it. Invited writers examine artworks in detail, offering a close analysis of the specific materials, techniques and installation devices used, and elaborating on their historical and art-historical contexts. As such, the texts reflect the material, conceptual, cultural and temporal diversity and scope of the Collection itself.⁵⁰

The contextual information from diverse writers framing modern and contemporary artworks produces a body of knowledge that enriches and extends the learning and appreciation of the works for a digital audience.

A very different story can be found on the University of Wollongong Gallery and Art Collection website, which offers a ‘Bird’s Eye View’ of its collection, a work in progress with multiple rows of thumbnail-sized images.⁵¹ Hovering over and clicking through to an image will open the object record. Such records contain metadata embedding colour codes, tags and keywords that enable the user to search the collection by a range of automatically generated subject tags, propelling the user towards potentially startling correspondences. Figure 6 shows part of the object record metadata for Lloyd Rees’s Illawarra Pastoral (1957).

Figure 6: Object record (detail), Lloyd Rees, Illawarra Pastoral.

Source: UoW Gallery and Art Collection, University of Wollongong.

UAMs can play an important role in bridging their mission with pedagogy and learning opportunities across the university. Indeed, as cultural institutions embedded in the higher education sector, UAMs set themselves apart from other public art museums. In a question assessing how UAMs exploit the use of their art collection in the digital environment to embed visual literacy and competencies, 62.5 per cent of respondents to the author’s online survey nominated ‘Contributing to broader teaching and enquiry in the university’ as their top choice.

Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA) emphasises its role in taking the art collection ‘to the core of teaching practice’.⁵² Using OBL as a model, the museum website offers a toolkit that includes comprehensive resources on the pedagogical framework and how to put OBL into practice both generally and specifically with material in FUMA. In supporting and coordinating OBL, FUMA is able to provide physical and digital access to a collection of some 8,000 works.⁵³ A limited number of other UAMs, including the University of Sydney and UTS, also explore multidisciplinary learning, transforming the museum into a classroom and ‘offering object-based learning experiences across all disciplines’.⁵⁴

Finally, sharing images on open-access, third-party platforms is another way to increase visibility. In the museum sector, the Powerhouse Museum led the way when it started releasing images on the Flickr Commons portal in 2008. It now offers over 2,500 photographs in collection or subject-specific albums on this platform.⁵⁵ QUT Art Museum also has a presence on Flickr, though its albums are primarily exhibition related.⁵⁶ Flickr can attract users who may not necessarily visit museums’ websites and images can be shared and tagged by users, contributing to their online discoverability. Images on platforms like Flickr can always be identified and sourced back to the institution that uploaded them.

Challenges and opportunities

The online survey undertaken as part of this research provided comments often expressing strategic priorities for the UAMs and insight into issues that might impede digitisation projects. When asked about the greatest barriers to digitisation, the survey revealed staffing concerns as the biggest challenge, with almost 50 per cent of participants choosing this option. Financial considerations were nominated in second place: could the staffing issue be linked to financial constraints or to a need for increased technical competencies? Or perhaps both? In a survey question addressing other challenges, copyright infringement featured strongly, and, for the publication and distribution of creative works, this is certainly a major obstacle. As museum professionals are acutely aware, acquiring artworks does not result automatically in acquiring copyright, and digitisation, which ‘involves performing the copyright owner’s exclusive rights such as reproduction, publication and communication’, could risk infringing copyright.⁵⁷

COVID-19 has had an impact on all corners of university life, not least university art museums and galleries. Ted Snell, academic and arts commentator, has reviewed innovative digitisation strategies piloted in a number of art museums at Australian universities, all UAMA members.⁵⁸ While his article focuses on public programming and virtual exhibitions, he mentions some of the collection digitisation projects and activities appraised by this researcher.

COVID-19 has been perceived by UAMs as both a challenge and an opportunity. Repercussions from the pandemic have become a double-edged sword: while the pandemic clearly accelerated interest in building an online presence, in terms of revenue, it hit the cultural sector hard, slowing progress of digitisation projects. As one participant in this survey lamented:

digitisation of the website has been delayed and this in turn has delayed project planning [for] the digitisation of the collection. Both have been delayed [due] to redundancies as a flow-on effect of Covid.

Figure 7: Responses to survey question: ‘Have you discovered other benefits to digitising artworks not foreseen when digitisation projects began?’

Source: Author’s research.

Yet the impacts of COVID-19 have provided flow-on benefits for UAMs to develop and showcase content online. Results from the online survey (see Figure 7) highlight the positive side of the COVID ‘effect’: 75 per cent of respondents saw COVID as having created an unforeseen benefit to digitisation projects. Another participant recounted how their UAM had used the time profitably to prepare the implementation of its collection online:

During the pandemic over the last 18 months a lot of background work has been completed for this including: copyright requests, data clean up and writing content so that the collection is presented in a professional and educational manner to facilitate research.

Conclusion

The research undertaken for this article has drawn a picture of the important themes and preoccupations for UAMs and it is hoped that it will contribute to current debates on digitisation. In reviewing different strategies adopted by UAMs to enhance the online visibility of their art collections, the article has addressed the current state of play: the extent of digitisation and discoverability of such holdings.

In summary, a number of key findings indicate that, while progress has been made in digitising art collections, there is still some way to go. In terms of the extent of digitisation, the research shows:

• a strong emphasis on audience engagement through exhibitions and public programming
• only one-third of UAMs have comprehensive and searchable online collections
• very little data are available on monitoring engagement with digitised collections.

Research addressing the discoverability of collections indicates that:

• thematic structuring to showcase selections or highlights from the collection is adopted to enhance discoverability
• UAMs look to add value to their online collections by deploying contextual or interpretative information, expanding metadata to increase search capability, and integrating object-based learning as a model for increasing the educational and research value of the collection.

The research has also shown that challenges and opportunities for digitisation projects include staffing and financial considerations, copyright and COVID-19.

A number of UAMs are progressing or embarking on the digitisation journey; however, there is scope to develop these activities strategically. For example, there appears to be little evidence of collaboration between UAMs whether in terms of financial partnerships (e.g. to achieve economies of scale in digitisation projects) or information sharing around design features, best practice and digital access plans. Implementing digital access plans, monitoring traffic to online collections to identify user patterns, and exploiting distribution possibilities via third-party, open-access platforms could aid strategic digitisation planning.

The nature of research today is shaped by digital technologies. The circulation and reception of visual art is no different and UAMs, which often lie at the heart of research-based activities in the humanities, need to play a leading role in this transformation. A work in digital form that may be accessed, shared and even manipulated can be experienced very differently to its physical counterpart. UAMs must not lose sight of this potential.

Acknowledgements

This article is drawn from my masters research project in 2021 and I wish to thank the UAM curators and managers who responded to my survey request; thank you for your time and your generous insights. I would like to thank Tina Du, my supervisor at the University of South Australia, for her support, and finally the two anonymous referees who provided such pertinent and thorough suggestions.

---

1. 1 Andrew Simpson, ‘Rethinking University Museums: Material Collections and the Changing World of Higher Education’, Museums Australia Magazine 22, no. 3 (2014): 18–22.

2. 2 Ibid., 21.

3. 3 Leonie Hannan, Rosalind Duhs and Helen Chatterjee, ‘Object-Based Learning: A Powerful Pedagogy for Higher Education’, in Museums and Higher Education Working Together: Challenges and Opportunities, ed. Anne Boddington, Jos Boys and Catherine Speight (Farnham: Routledge, 2013), 159–68; Simpson, ‘Rethinking University Museums’, 24.

4. 4 Antony Funnell, Julien Anfruns, Frank Howarth, Louise Douglas and Angelina Russo, ‘The Future of Museums: Part One’, Future Tense, ABC Radio National, 3 September 2009, www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/the-future-of-museums-part-one/3063218#transcript.

5. 5 Voyant Tools Help, ‘Tutorial/Workshop’, accessed 10 May 2021, voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/tutorial.

6. 6 Tim Mansfield, Chris Winter, Colin Griffith, Michael Dockery and Troy Brown, Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia’s Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation, CSIRO and Smart Services Co-operative Research Centre, 2014).

7. 7 Ibid., 16.

8. 8 Ibid., 18.

9. 9 Des Griffin, ‘Digitisation to Social Media’, in Understanding Museums: Australian Museums and Museology, ed. Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2011) nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/DGriffin_2011.html; Funnell et al., ‘The Future of Museums’; Simpson, ‘Rethinking University Museums’.

10. 10 Simpson, ‘Rethinking University Museums’, 22.

11. 11 Hannan, Duhs and Chatterjee, ‘Object-Based Learning’, 165.

12. 12 Andrew Bock, ‘Digitisation Is Putting the World’s Greatest Works within Reach’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 January 2020, www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/an-art-revolution-at-your-fingertips-20200121-p53te2.html; Adrian Murphy, ‘Digitising Collections—Breaking through the Museum Walls and Opening up Collections to the World’, Museums + Heritage Advisor, 3 March 2016, advisor.museumsandheritage.com/features/digitising-collections-breaking-museum-walls-opening-collections-world/.

13. 13 Bock, ‘Digitisation’.

14. 14 Murphy, ‘Digitising Collections’; Adrian Murphy, ‘Collections Dive at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums—Finding New Ways to Present Digital Content’, Museums + Heritage Advisor, 3 March 2016, advisor.museumsandheritage.com/features/collections-dive-at-tyne-wear-archives-museums-finding-new-ways-to-present-digital-content/. See also Caroline McBride’s account of strategies adopted at the research library of the Auckland Art Gallery to increase the visibility of archival records, including but not limited to digitisation, which complements artworks in the museum: Caroline McBride, ‘Engaging Archives: Activating Our Collections for New Audiences’, Art Libraries Journal 44, no. 3 (2019): 132–8, doi.org/10.1017/alj.2019.18.

15. 15 Gareth Lloyd Roderick, ‘Kyffin Williams Online: Creating a Digital Resource for an Art Collection at the National Library of Wales’, Art Libraries Journal 39, no. 1 (2014): 5–9, doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200018113; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso, 2005).

16. 16 Roderick, ‘Kyffin Williams Online’. See also Gabriella Giannachi, Rebecca Sinker, John Stack, Cristina Locatelli, Laura Carletti, Dominic Price, Derek McAuley, Tim Coughlan and Steve Benford, ‘ArtMaps: A Technology for Looking at Tate’s Collection’, Leonardo 50, no. 1 (2017): 20–6, doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01078.

17. 17 Peter Michel, ‘Digitizing Special Collections: To Boldly Go Where We’ve Been before’, Library Hi Tech 23, no. 3 (2005): 379–95, doi.org/10.1108/07378830510621793.

18. 18 Sarah Bromage, ‘Making Our Collections Visible’, Art Libraries Journal 44, no. 2 (2020): 68–72, doi.org/10.1017/alj.2020.5.

19. 19 Ibid.

20. 20 Elizabeth A. Novara, ‘Digitization and Researcher Demand: Digital Imaging Workflows at the University of Maryland Libraries’, OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives 26, no. 3 (2010): 166–76, doi.org/10.1108/10650751011073616; Rebecca Daly and Michael Organ, ‘Embed and Engage! Delivering a Digitisation Program at the University of Wollongong Library’, Australian Library Journal 63, no. 3 (2014): 220–37, doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2014.932680.

21. 21 Novara, ‘Digitization and Researcher Demand’.

22. 22 Daly and Organ, ‘Embed and Engage’.

23. 23 Ibid., 224.

24. 24 Craig Harkema and Cheryl Avery, ‘Milne en masse: A Case Study in Digitizing Large Image Collections’, New Review of Academic Librarianship 21, no. 2 (2015): 249–55, doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2015.1034806; Troy Fedderson, ‘Sheldon Project to Digitize Entire Art Collection’, Nebraska Today, 14 April 2016, news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/sheldon-project-to-digitize-entire-art-collection/.

25. 25 Fedderson, ‘Sheldon Project’.

26. 26 Bromage, ‘Making Our Collections Visible’; Mansfield et al., Innovation Study.

27. 27 Emma Pollard, ‘Australian Museum and Galleries Gets Virtual Tour Treatment from Google Street View Technology’, ABC News, 3 March 2015, www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-03/queensland-museum-gets-virtual-tour-treatment-from-google/6275100.

28. 28 UAMA, ‘Survey Report 2017–2019’, September 2020, www.uama.edu.au/siteassets/pdfs/uama-survey-report-2017-2019_infographics.pdf.

29. 29 UAMA, ‘Australian University Art Museums Benchmarking Report: Summary of Key Findings’, September 2009, www.uama.edu.au/siteassets/pdfs/uama-benchmarking-report-summary-dec-20091.pdf.

30. 30 UAMA, ‘Australian University Art Museums: The Big Picture’, Media Release, 21 September 2020, www.uama.edu.au/siteassets/pdfs/uama-survey-report-2017-2019_media-release_21-sep_uama.pdf.

31. 31 Ibid.

32. 32 Angela Goddard and Fiona Salmon, ‘Beyond the Curation of Corridors: University Art Museums as Connectors between the Academy and Community’, Nitro: Non Traditional Research Outcomes, 4 November 2016, creativematters.edu.au/edition-4-beyond-the-curation-of-corridors-university-art-museums-as-connectors-between-the-academy-and-community/.

33. 33 University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery, ‘About’, accessed 25 April 2021, www.usc.edu.au/art-gallery/about.

34. 34 Mansfield et al., Innovation Study.

35. 35 Funnell et al., ‘The Future of Museums’.

36. 36 Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, ‘Rite of Passage’, accessed 25 April 2021, www.artmuseum.qut.edu.au/whats-on/virtual-tours/virtual-tours/rite-of-passage.

37. 37 Ted Snell, ‘University Art Galleries: Behind Closed Doors’, Visual Arts Hub, accessed 21 April 2021, visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/opinions-and-analysis/visual-arts/ted-snell/university-art-galleries-behind-closed-doors-260258. For an example outside the UAM sector, see the Australian War Memorial’s virtual tour of its Art of Nation exhibition, accessed 27 November 2023, www.awm.gov.au/visit/exhibitions/art-of-nation.

38. 38 UTS Gallery & Art Collection, ‘University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Art Collection’, accessed 5 May 2021, art.uts.edu.au/index.php/collection/.

39. 39 University of the Sunshine Coast Art Gallery, ‘Collection’, accessed 25 April 2021, www.usc.edu.au/art-gallery/collection.

40. 40 University of Tasmania, Tyler Collection of Romanian and Modern Art, ‘Browse Items’, accessed 29 April 2021, tylercollection.omeka.net/items/tags.

41. 41 Australian Museums and Galleries Association, ‘Digital’, accessed 4 April 2021, www.amaga.org.au/digital.

42. 42 GLAM Peak, ‘Toolkit’, accessed 4 April 2021, www.digitalcollections.org.au/toolkit.

43. 43 University of Sydney, Chau Chak Wing Museum, ‘Collections’, accessed 25 April 2021, www.sydney.edu.au/museums/collections_search/.

44. 44 University of Sydney, Chau Chak Wing Museum, ‘Collections’.

45. 45 Mansfield et al., Innovation Study, 37.

46. 46 izi.TRAVEL, ‘Deakin University Sculpture Walk, Burwood’, accessed 25 April 2021, izi.travel/en/2584-deakin-university-sculpture-walk-burwood/en#c67ae5b3-1f07-49dc-b2a4-b3b1f51124e3.

47. 47 University of South Australia, Samstag Museum, ‘Art on Campus’, accessed 2 June 2021, unisa.edu.au/connect/samstag-museum/art-on-campus/.

48. 48 Macquarie University, ‘MQ Art Collections’, accessed 29 December 2023, www.mq.edu.au/about/facilities/museums-collections/macquarie-university-art-gallery/collections.

49. 49 Bock, ‘Digitisation’.

50. 50 Monash University Museum of Art, ‘100 Works of the Monash University Collection’, accessed 22 May 2021, www.monash.edu/muma/collection/100-works-of-the-monash-university-collection.

51. 51 University of Wollongong Art Collection, ‘Bird’s Eye View’, accessed 5 May 2021, art-collection.uow.edu.au/data-visualisations/birds-eye-view.

52. 52 Flinders University Museum of Art, ‘Education’, accessed 5 May 2021, www.flinders.edu.au/museum-of-art/education.

53. 53 Flinders University Museum of Art, ‘Object-Based Learning at FUMA’, accessed 5 May 2021, www.flinders.edu.au/museum-of-art/object-based-learning-toolkit/obl-fuma.

54. 54 University of Sydney, Chau Chak Wing Museum, ‘The Chau Chak Wing Museum’, accessed 25 April 2021, www.sydney.edu.au/museum/about-us.html.

55. 55 Flickr, ‘Powerhouse Museum’, accessed 10 May 2021, www.flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/albums.

56. 56 Flickr, ‘QUT Art Museum’, accessed 10 May 2021, www.flickr.com/photos/qutartmuseum/albums.

57. 57 Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon, ‘Digital Access: The Impact of Copyright on Digitisation Practices in Australian Museums, Galleries, Libraries and Archives’, UNSW Law Journal 30, no. 1 (2007): 22.

58. 58 Snell, ‘University Art Galleries’. Ted Snell passed away in September 2023.