National Museums Scotland, Digital Collecting in Museums, 2020

Abstract

• A multi-disciplinary group of museum and heritage professionals with shared interests in collecting born-digital material met at the National Museum of Scotland on 11 March 2020 to discuss best practice and opportunities. The symposium included a range of papers outlining different approaches to collecting and interpreting digital entities, with definite themes emerging from the symposium as a whole. Content ranged from photography to videogames, social media to digital-physical hybrid objects. Through engagement with digital objects, each of the speakers encountered similar opportunities and challenges. This report summarises the discussion along five interlinked themes: Defining the Digital Object, Methods, Display, Legal and Ethical Challenges and, finally, the overarching question ‘Why Collect the Born-Digital?’ Participants then contributed to quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Overall, a picture emerges of a growing (but by no means established) consensus on the methods, values and principles of digital collecting.