Pushing the Limits beyond Catalogue Raisonnée: Step 1. Identifying digitalization challenges in museums

Abstract

Museums collect and preserve natural and cultural heritage. Although contemporary information systems are used for managing and exhibiting collections, they have been designed from the viewpoint of sup-porting practices and methods from the renaissance period. This makes digitizing and innovating new services challenging. In this paper, we focus on the first step in developing digital services in museums and conduct a two-part exploratory survey on 58 experts (directors, collection and exhibition curators, IT experts) to understand their perceptions on differ-ent challenges of digitizing, innovating and creating e-services. The experts first identified different IS re-lated challenges and then selected the most signifi-cant ones. Our findings thus provide insights not only about the challenges but also show how their per-ceived importance vary between the expert groups. These insights help researchers and practitioners to study and develop methods and means to digitize and innovate in museums and other organizations with very long traditions, and thus, with strong culture of doing things in an old way.