Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Museums are currently going through rapid digital transformation. However, museums in the Global South lack sufficient technical, human, and financial resources to ensure timeliness and high-quality digital cultural content creation. This means that these museums’ route and approach to digitizing collections requires specific digital solutions. These solutions need to be feasible while still being ethical and sustainable. This paper draws on the process of and results from a co-designed digitization project, including interviews, consultations, visits, an audience survey, and the digitization of cultural heritage artefacts at the Vietnamese Women’s Museum (VWM), The Vietnamese National Museum of Fine Arts (VNMFA), and Vietnamese National Museum of History (VNMH) between 2020 and 2023. This project applied museum professionals’ and local audiences’ needs and desires for digital developments in digitization projects, as they aptly shared what they wanted to be digitized and how they wanted it to be digitally presented online – while respecting the local context. This approach can ensure more sustainable and ethical digitization practices and creation of digital museums. Findings show that the process of creating digital culture is of high importance for ensuring proper decisions are made about what, how, where, who should create and publish digital cultural heritage. It is at this point where we can better ensure sustainability and ethics for the long-term sustainability of digital culture.