The digital era has revolutionised the way we access information and interact with it. Museums, as custodians of cultural and historical artefacts, can benefit substantially from this transformation. Open Access and FOSS can greatly increase the potential of museums for public outreach: enhance their educational impact and inspire new forms of cultural engagement and knowledge discovery. For example, by digitising collections and enabling Open Access for diverse audiences, accessibility barriers are eliminated and thousands of hidden treasures become available to both researchers and the wider public. Additionally, innovative data visualisations via FOSS platforms can reveal compelling insights into object collections and the research associated with them; Open Access can thus make complex research accessible and engaging to a broader audience. Through such practices, museums can democratise their activities and enrich the visitor experience. The process is not without obstacles; common challenges museums face in adopting Open Access policies are copyright issues, data privacy, and resource limitations.
The presentation will discuss the aforementioned opportunities and issues currently emerging in the museum sector. The talk will be illustrated with examples from the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the world’s largest museum of science and technology.
