International Museum Day 2021 – Let’s Digitalize Culture

This past Tuesday marked International Museum Day 2021 which took place under the motto “The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine.” Museums have had a hard time in the last year – a lot has changed which made the development of new concepts and approaches necessary. Due to the many closed days, the focus shifted to digital offers and reaching the public off the beaten track. This required new and perhaps unfamiliar approaches, which is why we launched the project “Digitalizing Culture.” We want to provide organizations and companies from the tourism, art, and culture sectors with urgently needed digital solutions, offer them an innovative platform, and support them in communicating with their target groups.

The Pandemic and Digitalization in the Cultural Sector

Digitalization was already an important topic before the pandemic, but it has become a much more urgent issue since March 2020 with the onset of Covid-19 induced restrictions. In many countries, public life stood still, and museums, theaters, and concert halls in particular were closed for a long time or still even are. As a result, they were also cut off from their audience who suddenly could no longer visit exhibitions, performances, plays, or concerts. Those who had previously engaged with digital channels had a clear advantage: they were able to give insights into closed exhibitions, show background stories by curators, hold online workshops, develop new formats, and much more. Even if everyone is happy that cultural institutions have reopened, some digital innovations will not disappear, rather likely last for a longer period of time and gain importance. It may not be the same as visiting a museum in person, but online we can also see exhibitions from far away institutions that we might never have been able to visit, gain insights into archives, enjoy interactive cultural promotion, and much more. In addition, the pandemic has shown us how quickly things that were previously taken for granted can change and how important it is to be able to react quickly to these changes.

Digitalizing Culture – Our Initiative

We have been working closely with museums for a long time and, among other things, have supported them in breaking new ground in art and culture promotion. For example, we develop digital media guides that can be listened to and easily viewed directly on your smartphone. These can be enjoyed on site or from the comfort of your own home, so you can visit exhibitions virtually, for example, the Vienna Secession. But how can we further support organizations in digitalization, especially during this difficult pandemic? This question prompted us to act proactively for the cultural and tourism sectors and started the “Digitalizing Culture” initiative. Every cultural institution, be it historical museums, art museums, exhibition spaces, local museums, or others, can register and, as a first step, be listed with their own page on our website. In this way, interested parties can easily find the respective organizations, plan visits to exhibitions, or find digital offers. We also offer the complete creation of digital audio guides or support in creating them, as well as digital marketing, podcasts, and much more. So stay curious, there will be many exciting innovations in the future!

One of the many organizations already participating is mumok, one of Austria’s most renowned modern art museums. It had already began to work with digitalization before Corona and was therefore able to quickly develop interesting offers such as 360-degree exhibition tours. It is therefore not surprising that mumok always seeks opportunities for digital cooperation and has already become part of our initiative:

“We are very happy to be part of the great initiative Digitalizing Culture – Austria 2021 with the mumok – Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna. In this challenging time for all cultural institutions, networking via a common presentation platform is particularly important. We are excited to the coming months and hope that Digitalizing Culture will meet with broad interest throughout Austria and internationally.”

mumok Vienna

Many other cultural organizations from all nine federal states have also registered including the Schönbrunn Group, the Vienna Secession, the Vienna State Opera, Schallaburg, the Roman city of Carnuntum, Museum Niederösterreich, Museum Gugging, Halle für Kunst (Steiermark), Swarovski Crystal Worlds, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Women’s Museum, and many more!

Experience Culture Digitally

Some things are still to be published, but we already have exciting offers to experience culture digitally: for example, you can browse destinations from Athens to Vienna to Zagreb and get to know these cities with our various guides – you can experience city tours, or check out our guides from selected museums such as the MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Military Museum of the Belgrade Fortress, the Vienna Secession, and many more! Here in the blog you can find more exciting information from the world of travel and culture as well as the latest news on the cultural landscape and digitalization every week. Stay tuned for other offers such as podcasts, videos, and industry discussions!

You can register for our blog newsletter here, as well as for our B2B newsletter for members of museums, cultural institutions, organizations, companies, etc. who want to stay up to date on our initiatives, progress, and news in the field of culture & digitalization.

We are looking forward to the exciting time ahead of us and a culturally rich summer!

You can still register until 31.5. for all features of the “Digitalizing Culture” initiative. Detailed information is available on our website.