(High resolution) April 2011 (PDF

New Technologies
The National Museums
of Scotland
In the last two years National Museums Scotland has taken
significant steps forward in how we utilise digital tools and
technologies to help communicate what we do and
encourage people to get involved with us. The creation of a
specific Digital Media team in 2009 has meant an increased
focus on how we use our own website, social media, other
websites and mobile phones to give access to collections
information, offer different forms of interpretation and
engage with our audiences.
National Museums Scotland has a highly diverse range
of collections spanning five museums (the National
Museums of War, Flight, Costume, Rural Life and our main
location in Edinburgh, the National Museum of Scotland)
across six curatorial departments ranging from World
Cultures to Science & Technology.
As with the curation of a ‘real’ display or exhibition there
is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to showcasing museum
objects on digital platforms. Our objects vary vastly in size,
scale, origin and type; a tiny fossil, a medieval sword, a set
of bagpipes, a WWII recruitment poster or Concorde!
Thinking about how we demonstrate such variety online
presents us with lots of opportunities, but there is a
constant challenge of whether to focus on small amounts of
in-depth content covering specific subject areas (our
interactive resource on the Lewis Chessmen is a good
example of this http://www.nms.ac.uk/chessmen or a more
broad-brush approach, akin to a lot of museums’ online
collections, where we try to feature as large a range of
object records as possible. Presently we’re edging forward
on both fronts, making sure we measure what’s working
along the way.
42 MAGAZINE ISSUE 06
Telling the story behind-the-scenes of the Museum has
proved to be a lively and popular way of increasing
awareness of our work online. Our blog
http://feastbowl.wordpress.com took a little time to get off
the ground – generating enough intriguing stories and
giving a sense of the range of activities we undertake meant
working across a number of museum sites and internal
departments. Explaining what we were trying to achieve and
also familiarising staff with blogging style and tools was an
important first step, and the blog has established a healthy
audience in a relatively short space of time, and has been
the source of some unexpected discussions!
In 2010 we substantially overhauled our web presence.
We redesigned the website http://www.nms.ac.uk with new
navigation, big colourful images and took some important
steps with the technology that underpins it. A key point in
this regard is that we’re not only considering how people
view the site using traditional PCs and laptops, but also how
it can be viewed using mobile phones and new tablet devices
(such as the Apple iPad). This is an important factor for
anyone who is considering a new website, or is redeveloping
their existing one – sales of smartphones recently overtook
those of PCs for the first time and people are increasingly
accessing the web through them.
We’ve also made headway in setting up presences on
social media websites. Social media is the collective term
commonly given to websites and online tools which allow
users to interact with each other in some way. We have