Digital X Art is a Digital Resource for museum professionals. The aim of the site is to create an online resource to assist museum professionals in the usage of digital technologies. The site aims to gather webinars, blog posts, journal and news articles for users to access. The site also has a reading list of essential books to help emerging professionals find the resources they desire.
The scale of access provided by digital technologies has changed how learners and scholars access information. Museums -similarly to the academy- are places in which knowledge is preserved, shared and created. In the last decade, the scale of using digital technologies for the sake of sharing art and art history has expanded exponentially. Museums have used AI to communicate, they’ve worked with the community to democratize knowledge through edit-a-thons, and created online exhibitions mapping relationships between collections, artists and places.
Digital usage at museums is part of digital humanities. The tools and projects used are very similar, if not identical. Digital Humanities Now is an online resource for the DH community to find information on the latest tools, projects, and grants. Museums face a similar problem in which knowledge on digital projects in museums is dispersed.
Digital can mean a multitude of things, and digital professionals are sometimes (wrongly) expected to be informed to know how to do it all from building apps and preserving digital files to creating social media posts. The site hopes to create a series of tool-kits to measure, maintain and develop projects for an institution. We began by creating a digital strategy as our first resource.
Digital projects in museums are not commonly reported on in newspapers but are discussed on Twitter. Digital professionals in libraries, museums, and the broader humanities are active on the platform sharing information about on-going projects and best practices. As part of the project, a Twitter account has been created. The account aims to find and share information on projects.
The issues facing the academy in terms of access (global and community access) of knowledge is similar to museums. Both museums and the academy are created and operated by the same group of people. The tools used to ensure access through translation and community outreach in DH and museums are not similar to each other, they are the same. Metadata, mapping and online databases are tools which museums use. Museums have begun democratization knowledge through Wikipedia similarly to DH. The tools, methods, and approaches between digital museum professionals and DH are parallel.
To access the resource, please visit: www.DigitalXArt.com