1 Digital attitudes and data perceptions: COVID-19 has changed the understanding of the use and importance of data within the institutions, with the recognition that strategic preparedness significantly influences the ability to realise the shift to digital and remote delivery
All participants stated that COVID-19 significantly affected the way they were working, but when asked about their first reactions, there was evidence that people had different perceptions of how well things transitioned immediately after closure. Interviewees reported that it was quite messy and everything just ground to an halt, causing a situation where “everyone’s just sort of fumbling around and trying to work it out, professional and organised in the lack of clarity” (P1) and that “the priorities for the whole museum have shifted to a kind of like basic needs survival mode” (P2). Others were unable to access sources that are important to fulfil their job role either because they had no access to online systems from their homes or because in many instances the physical assets, such as ledgers and artwork dossiers, had not been digitised. Although digital collections and information were generally seen as a necessity and lifeline during lockdowns, there can be barriers to digitisation when the process goes against the grain of conventional museum practices: for example, one participant remarked that these ledgers are often the only source of metadata for collections, so it is an issue of trust to hand them over to vendors for remote digitisation, and whilst many museums perform this leap of faith, some refuse to lend them out. Interviewees were critical of a general institutional reluctance to embrace the concept of digitising and concerned that colleagues needed a pandemic to realise that analogue material could be rendered inaccessible or, worse, destroyed, making digitisation as crucial to conservation as it is for reaching online audiences.
One participant was frustrated that digital leaders in museums had been advocating for years to adopt a digital-first approach and that the previous resistance had completely reversed:
“[We were] really fighting leadership and fighting curators and fighting other decision makers at the museum that digital should be prioritised and is important. Suddenly, everybody’s like: can you make everything I’m doing digital? Can you do all my programmes? Make them all digital! So there’s been a shift in sort of mindset, I think around of, you know, how we do things.” (P6)
This shift in mindset was common across most of the interviewees and almost all reported that data was seen as more important to their work and valuable to their institutions than it was pre-COVID. Interviewees claimed that the way data and digital are understood has changed. For example, online collections were identified as “the core” (P4) of operations and “suddenly it is a sharper focus on [their] importance and role” (P2). Participants highlighted digital assets as the sole means for staying present to the public during lockdown and institutions were “starting to realise the capacity of data and digital in a way they didn’t before” (P1), ending the “analogue digital stand-off” (P3).
The Smithsonian Institution acknowledged the capacity of data and digital before the pandemic, noted as a “digital first strategy” (Smithsonian Institution, 2017) within the 2017–2022 strategic plan, and presenting a clear advantage in preparedness. This was also raised by one of our interview partners:
“COVID sped up a lot of thinking that began at least two years ago when the just prior Secretary did his new strategic plan. And one of the goals was to reach 1 billion people. And you know, that would have to be virtually, would have to be digitally and moving away from the on-site visits emphasis and the emphasis on the physical buildings. And then when our new Secretary came in and one of his three major plans is the virtual Smithsonian. So, this was before any of this happened. So, the thinking was already moving in that direction.” (P8)
This direction was established before the pandemic and contributed to developing digital programmes on “speed drive” (P8) when COVID-19 hit the globe, but also enabled the museums of the Institution to repackage and purposefully reuse existing content. This readiness combined with the support of the new leadership, which has similar visions of digital for the public good in the service of the Smithsonian’s communities.
As a local authority museum, with a highly localised strategy to conserve and promote collections for the city and its citizens, MAG had not yet fully embraced a digital strategy when the pandemic struck. The immediate response of the museum was to stop its operations and reflect on the development of an online body rather than to spend a disproportionate amount of energy in joining museums around the world in “racing to produce endless content in an attention economy” (P1). The closure of the gallery was seen as a time to recalibrate the institution in terms of thinking about digital activities and to learn about digital content in a way “to stop seeing digital as being the signpost to a visitor experience and it being a form of collective thinking” (P1). P1 remarked that institutions and people working in them will start to realise the capacity of data and the digital in a world that is going to be markedly different once opened up again and the lessons learnt after the pandemic will be reflected in the data around the collections. They argued that this could enable the use of collections in more interesting ways, referring to a complete reset of all collection data to zero “where nothing has any meaning or date and you would rebuild its meaning, connectivity, and networks or derive understanding from the network” (P1).
As discussed above, the National Gallery’s key objective within its new corporate plan is “a National Gallery with digital at its heart, to reflect a more digital world” (National Gallery, 2018). The plan sets out interest in digital to fulfil a public mission for education, to provide outreach of the collections, to facilitate new research partnerships, and to generate income diversification. This meant that the intention if not the culture for digital delivery was in place when the museum buildings closed. When asked about the perception of the physical closure, P5 stated that
“it’s been really, really useful to have just one team looking at digital and physical. It helped us to really transition quite quickly to focusing on who is the digital visitor.” (P5)
This was seconded by P4, who saw the impact as lessened by the fact that people were used to collaborating digitally and a working from home policy was already in place before COVID-19. Outside their team, they claimed that people started to realise the usefulness of putting analogue information online, however, they identified a general tendency towards replicating curatorial content online rather than trying to optimise the data side of collections, such as indexing, classifying, and bringing catalogues as interoperable texts online. They said that this is a question of commitment and that “the notion of taking the sort of curatorial presentation of the collection and just doing it digitally rather than physically is probably not the best use of resources” (P4). This sentiment was also expressed by other participants. Some observed that institutions were “reverting to a more curator driven than user or visitor driven approach” (P8) and a more “uptight” (P1) use of online collections, with “people just throwing digital programming out there and there is no system in place to know what’s working and what isn’t” (P10).
All participants perceived increased demand for digital content since the first lockdown, but institutions varied in the choice and the amount of content that they felt they should offer in response. Whilst some museums spent a “disproportionate amount of energy trying to provide online entertainment” (P1), others emphasised that their pre-pandemic set-up enabled them to tailor content according to interest through user tracking and real time evaluation, delivering the content people were searching for, and avoiding users “being flooded” (P10).
Overall, participants recognised the power of the internet to reach out to people and acknowledged that the pandemic led to a digital awakening and a “mind shift to the digital” (P6). They admitted that the often feared enemy of the physical space can be a useful tool to connect, widening reach and producing attendance numbers that far exceed on-site events. Now the potential of a digital offering has been demonstrated, museums seem likely to keep online provisions post-COVID, using digital technologies as a virtual auditorium.
2 Data and decision-making: a newfound focus on numbers in the pandemic is also observed in museums
Metrics and numbers have become a key trope of the pandemic: public health communications through the media and government briefings have been data-driven and expressed graphs, from cases and deaths, to numbers of people vaccinated. This phenomenon is also observable in museum management, as participants reported that SLT were suddenly more metric aware and asking for metrics that either had not been tracked before, or data that was tracked but had not previously been of interest:
“One interesting thing for me is that I’ve gone from reporting to the Trustees once every six weeks to every week.” (P5)
There was a sense that data was driving decision-making, with one participant wondering “whether the way we think about data as institutions will change almost in a sort of pre-emptive way” (P1).
The operational set-up of institutions and the general ‘metric-awareness’ of people in leadership positions influenced the perception and usage of metrics. Institutions with a focus on digital provisions were able to quickly adapt their dashboards and tracking tools, whereas others struggled to cope with the new demand to reflect the museum’s operations in numbers. Data was used more directly and more often for decision making than before COVID-19.
For example, data gathered through user research supported decisions about digital tool development and allowed online programming to be adjusted to demand. These metrics were highlighted as important during interviews, but their use also led to discussions in institutions and the wider sector about the terminology of measurement, laying bare discrepancies in understanding, most notably in relation to issues of reach, engagement, and impact and how to successfully and consistently analyse and measure them. The pandemic has provided the motivation to (re)think current systems that are not fit for purpose, exposing where traditional metrics were no longer applicable or lack compliance with systems for tracking new digital analytics data. For example, one participant reflected on the “challenge for data to understand progress in relation to inclusion” (P2) and another one identified that “this whole evolution toward more digital has definitely produced, you know, the need for different kinds of metrics and different kinds of data” (P8).
This new reliance on metrics also raised issues regarding the interpretation of data. One interviewee pointed out that data driven decisions are often made under the assumption that having numbers reduces uncertainty, but the reality is that a lot of decisions are based on intuition and prior knowledge, and that numbers need contextualisation to be useful. Most participants therefore saw having a data scientist or staff with skills to interpret data as very useful and recognised it as a disadvantage for institutions who do not have such staff.
Another source of the new appetite for data was the management of re-openings, which was severely impacted by social distancing measures. The National Gallery was able to forecast and plan by using visitor tracking obtained by Wi-Fi data to predict dwell times and journeys through the gallery with graphs and machine learning models, “where tracking the most common journeys is now helping us to look at [...] what would be the best way” (P5). The application of these systems was mentioned not just regarding crowd control, but also recognised as useful to future exhibition planning, visitor management and exhibition design when placing objects in the physical museum space, for example when displaying paintings that tend to be audience magnets.
3 Audiences and engagement: COVID-19 radically reshaped audiences and engagement and generated innovation for public good
Reviewing the three museums’ mission statements and strategy documents it is evident that their identified audiences vary significantly in terms of reach and impact. Whereas the Smithsonian and the National Gallery define their audiences as “global” (Smithsonian Institution, 2017) and “worldwide” (National Gallery, 2018), MAG’s operational reach is highly localised, as “for and of the people of Manchester” (Manchester Art Gallery, n.d.). These distinctions can be found in relation to the means through which institutions plan to reach their audiences, with the Smithsonian striving to become “not only digital first, but mobile first” (Smithsonian Institution, 2017) and the National Gallery seeing digital as an “enormous opportunity” (National Gallery, 2018), whilst MAG does not make any specific reference towards online audiences or digital engagement.
Nevertheless, participants from all museums said that COVID-19 sent them back to the drawing board, re-addressing questions of audience segmentation, motivation, and interaction. There were concerns that in a (post-)pandemic environment traditional visitor profiles may no longer apply and institutions may be looking at completely new and emerging audiences which sit outside of current visitor profiling. For example, the pandemic has elicited engagement with audiences beyond the classic visitor spectrum, including people who have never been to a gallery in-person before. It is important to think about the expectations of these groups when becoming first time physical visitors, foreshadowing a potentially significant change where “opening our doors, mandating how they experience the gallery” (P5) will not suffice. This concern was revealed by several participants, who remarked that most understanding of public engagement was focussed on on-site visitors, and existing data therefore cannot be used to build effective online marketing as it is based on face to face experiences.
COVID-19 has not only affected the audience spectrum of institutions; participants also reported a significant increase in traffic to online portals for various reasons. When asked about the most sought-after content, interviewees unequivocally said the highest demand was for educational and inspiring content, mostly driven by parents home-schooling their children, teachers (re-)using content designed for pedagogical use, and people who sought inspiration and intellectually stimulating content:
“[T]hey were looking for things that were coming from a trusted source and so they didn’t want just anything they could find online, they didn’t necessarily want something from more of an entertainment source, they really want, they were looking for things that they assumed would have some educational value, because they were from a museum institution.” (P6)
Our review identifies education as one of the core missions of all three institutions, but closer scrutiny of their online offer during the pandemic reveals that institutions who were digitally prepared had an advantage in putting content online and serving education communities. Those who have a wider reach also seem to have been more able to fulfil their missions during the pandemic, whereas those without digital strategies were offering very limited content, making them unable to sustain their service and deliver online.
The ability to track engagement is a valuable asset, enabling staff to adjust content according to data, to evaluate demand and to package material according to user feedback. This supports teachers in giving students agency when choosing what activity they want to work on, presenting a noticeable shift in approach to curriculum facilitation and learning, since digital not only attributes agency of choice beyond classic curriculum content but also breaks with the often linear narratives of ‘normal’ museum learning in physical space, enabling a different kind of experience. Participants also recognised home-schooling as a driver of website traffic and potential museum visitors: P5 considered how parents home-schooling their children using museum content might eradicate the barrier to engaging with museums and galleries in the future as it might make them feel more confident having had the digital as their first touch point.
The reality of new audiences and surge in demand for online educational content prompted interviewees to advocate for more nuanced sets of data around audience research that ask specific questions around reach, engagement, and accessibility. They asserted that to answer those questions requires different methodologies and forms of interpretation compared with on-site metrics, as well as the need for inclusive programming to stop “an erasing of cultural specificity and cultural sensitivity of digital offerings” (P9).
There were issues of accessibility, some under the direct influence of institutions, others not. Participants felt that one positive outcome of the pandemic might be that institutions were forced to tackle issues that had been overlooked by museums before the pandemic. One participant reflected on their engagement with care home residents and that “such thoughts were provoked through experimenting with social media and digital interfaces out of the need to stay connected during lockdowns, enabling us to have discussions and conversations that may have not been possible without technology” (P3).
The Smithsonian saw an increased demand for bilingual content, mostly due to parents home-schooling their children, prompting the Smithsonian’s Learning Lab to develop content tailored to Spanish speakers; due to the pandemic, the Lab saw an increase in website traffic of up to 400% compared with 2019. Both P6 and P10 saw a greater demand for low-tech products, where a device is used to access the material, but it does not necessarily require a high bandwidth or content to be printer-friendly. One participant highlighted that some people have either no device at all to access museums online or not enough bandwidth to use content involving significant data. This prompted the Smithsonian to think of ways to reach people ‘beyond device’, handing out educational materials at school lunch drop-off locations where families could still come to get food although schools were closed.
The digital divide further exists as a rift between institutions themselves, separating those who have data from those who do not. One participant further extended this to institutions who have data accessible from home and those who do not, as those museums that have digitised data accessible collections have been able to continue to work, engage, and research whereas others are only now realising how important it is to have digitised assets.
4 Future-proofing the museum: museums plan for a new paradigm after COVID-19, acknowledging that the pandemic will have a long-lasting impact
We asked participants to make predictions about the future of institutions and how they are preparing not just in terms of reopening their physical facilities, but also for the long term. All participants agreed that the future will look different and that the pandemic will have a long-lasting effect. Interviewees raised concerns about the allocation of resources and the economic impact of the pandemic both in commercial income and in longer term public funding and had fears about lessons not learnt and a possible lost momentum for institutions. However, they also saw COVID-19 as an opportunity to disrupt old habits and address issues that were affecting their sector, but which had not been previously brought to the top of the agenda. Whereas the pandemic itself was not perceived as positive, some participants acknowledged that positive outcomes may come from it.
One of the themes that emerged was the monetisation of digital content. Participants stated that this was mostly motivated by trying to match self-generated income goals, combined with the struggle to charge for cultural content “because people tend to not attribute any monetary value to it” (P2), because it was seen as something that had already been paid for through public taxation, or because of an assumption that institutions should offer everything for free. Participants remarked that museums are on one hand operating as revenue-driven enterprises and on the other hand as institutions whose mission is to educate and diffuse knowledge as widely as possible, causing a dilemma that needs careful consideration, especially with the ongoing digital divide.
One participant feared that current digital programmes cannot be sustained after re-opening the physical sites due to insufficient funds to run both at the same scale and that the public, but also leadership teams, will have higher expectations that institutions would fail to deliver. The problem of successfully monetising digital content was also related to the establishment of relevant performance indicators for museums, a task not yet fully achieved according to participants. If in place, these would enable museums to fundraise for digital programmes, allowing them to quantify the success of digital provision to attract patrons, sponsors, and donors.
In addition to funding, our interviewees showed a concern about how future-proofed the sector was more broadly, in terms of longer term sustainability and leadership, with the greatest worries about smaller, less financially secure institutions. Participants felt that the pandemic had put leadership teams into the unique position of steering the digital future of museums, not just in regard to their strategies, but also in terms of finding a new equilibrium between onsite and digital. The pandemic was seen as “an opportunity to really rethink everything” (P10) from streamlining operations and establishing partnerships, to including new audiences and changing organisational culture. Participants feared that it will be a lost opportunity in some cases, as institutions either revert to former operating modes in a form of risk aversion, are afraid of changing organisational structures, or lack understanding of their audiences and the content they require: “[a]lthough money is always a constraint, one of the bigger constraints is the culture, the organisational culture” (P7). They predicted a future that brings a new paradigm for institutions in a world that has changed considerably and acknowledged that it is the right time to address societal issues, disrupt past patterns, and use the time post-COVID to integrate the progression of digital strategy and infrastructure.