Hacking the Collections

Digital technology is fundamentally changing the way that the public interacts with museum objects. This can be seen in the African Rock Art Image Project at the British Museum. From 2013-2018, the project registered c. 25,000 born-digital objects from throughout Africa. The central remit of the project was to ensure global open access to this important rock art collection by developing new and innovative ways of audience engagement with the archive. As a wholly digital collection, this provided several opportunities and challenges to engage with scholars, the general public, and local and source communities online. To move beyond a standard online catalogue, the project experimented with 3D models, online exhibitions, virtual reality, and 3D prints. Additionally, as further digital outputs were created, a key goal was to make the collection and information available to the widest possible audience. This meant balancing the digital outputs with possible bandwidth constraints experienced by local and source communities in various parts of Africa. This paper will discuss how museums can experiment with digital collections, but also need to consider the accessibility of these digital collections, in connection to possible constraints, as well as the importance of making research engaging to general audiences.