Revenue Generation from Digitized Collections
I’ve worked in the non-profit sector my entire career including a few years in public media, a cousin of cultural heritage in a sense. There are many aspects to revenue generation that organizations must tend to, but for the sake of this discussion I will stick to the digital space and relevant case study.
The mobile application created for the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece is an excellent example of theoretical innovation made unsuccessful by cumbersome technology. The idea to create an online shopping experience for visitors to design merchandise of their choosing, based on the museum’s collection is a seemingly brilliant way to promote the organization and commercialize these pieces without limiting public accessibility. In this case, however, the user experience in the app was designed with too many steps to keep the user engaged. Ten steps to complete the shopping process was at least three, but probably five, too many. I would have recommended cutting the registration (the museum should be collecting emails at entrance) and removing design flexibility (product templates should not be editable). The purchasing process could be further expedited if payment options were to default to Apple Pay or PayPal as the researchers note.
Separate from the user experience, I think it is important to point out that not all pieces of a collection should be available for commercialization. On one hand, it is relatively harmless to take a painting originally created to go on the wall in someone’s home and print it on a t-shirt or tote bag. On the other, it would be extremely inappropriate to do the same with an artifact of cultural significance to an indigenous community for example. Should another museum go the route of the SMCA, it may be best that the administrators and curators together pre-select just a few “flagship” pieces from their collection for reproduction on merchandise. I am of the opinion that if an organization such as a museum is publicly funded, then their product must be publicly available. Digitization is the way to make this possible. Monetization is probably best considered only when other avenues for revenue are exhausted.
Valeonti, F., Hudson-Smith, A., Terras, M., Zarkali, C.(2018) Reaping the Benefits of Digitisation: Pilot student exploring revenue generation from digitised collections through technological innovation.
