Digital cultural heritage in the time of pandemic - Reflections upon a year of lockdown

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic has shown that digital content and infrastructures are increasingly essential, at a time when routine business and commercial frameworks have been disrupted or permanently destroyed, particularly in the cultural and heritage sectors (Arts Council 2020; Bakhshi 2020; Creative Scotland 2020). Yet it has also been a time of digital opportunity for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums: when digital representations of culture and heritage is all that is accessible, digitised versions of artefacts and objects have shown both how essential digitisation now is, and the versatility of digitisation. Cultural Heritage is important for wellbeing (Power and Smyth 2016), and although many institutions worldwide had to restrict physical access, 86% of museums increased their online presence and/or the amount of content they were placing online (ArtFund 2020), online searches for aggregated cultural content “quadrupled” (Gaskin 2020), with emerging opportunities regarding the reframing of digitised content as an essential part of cultural memory (Kahn 2020).

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5793151

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https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/16323e5a-6888-45d2-812d-0a765e06edd0