8 reasons why Portugal’s national museums benefited from a major digitization project
While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic prevents us from physically entering public spaces, the Internet has undoubtedly become our main point of contact with the museum world. The present time seems like a fitting occasion to reflect on the outcomes of Portugal’s most significant museum digitisation project — Portugal: Art and Heritage.
The result of a partnership between Google Arts and Culture and the DGPC (Portugal’s Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage), the mission of this considerable endeavour was to create an online deposit for the collections of all of Portugal’s twenty-two national museums and monuments. Carried out after many years of successive public cuts to the arts, this project allowed major underlying hurdles to be overcome. Below I list eight developments that were of benefit to Portugal’s museums:
- Unlimited Server Space
Due to budgetary constraints, server space was very limited, and museums could only display thumbnail-sized images of their collections. The project provided museums with access to unlimited server space. As a result, Portugal’s museums can display the totality of their collections online, in whatever resolution desired.
2. Art Camera Captures
Through the project, 1.000+ artworks were captured using the Google Art Camera. These ultra-high-resolution captures enable viewers to look at artworks in otherwise impossible detail. An excellent tool for conservation purposes, curators can also use these images to create engaging in-painting tours. A major achievement of note was the digitization of the Saint Vincent Panels, one of the most emblematic group portraits of the Renaissance and, at the time, the largest known digitization of a single artwork consisting of 140 billion pixels.
3. Virtual Exhibits
Curators and museum professionals can now make virtual exhibitions resorting to multiple types of content: art camera captures, Street View, high-resolution images and artworks from other collections. According to the words of one museum director, ‘in the absence of funding for physical exhibitions, we can now create all the exhibitions we like online with limited or no budget’.
4. Image Bank
The aforementioned server restrictions meant museum professionals had no immediate access to a high-resolution image deposit of their collections. As a result, they can now download high-resolution images at will, to use as they wish.
5. Mobile-Friendly Content
The platform is seamlessly mobile-friendly. The growing importance of mobile phones as the preferred means of online engagement for younger generations hit me recently. When a colleague of mine approached a young nephew to show him the project, he said he was already familiar with it. He and his colleagues had been looking at the site on their phones over a lunch breakat school.
6. Potential as a Repository of Open Access Content
At a time when heritage organisations increasingly promote universal access to their collections by pursuing Open Access policies. On the G.Arts platform, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has adopted such practices, making images openly available for download. Portugal’s collections could eventually be made available to all should the national museums pursue an Open Access policy.
7. Knowledge Graph Integration
Through the G. Arts platform, artworks will be readily integrated into the Knowledge Graph Google Search, a tool that understands and connects relevant information over many categories. This tool provides you with all the information you seek in one place. To illustrate this point, to the left is the Google search result for one of Portugal’s most emblematic painters Nuno Gonçalves. Here you’ll find that Knowledge Graph GS has conveniently compiled artworks painted by the artist in one place.
8. Integration into Wider Categorical Contexts
One of museums’ biggest challenges is compiling artworks of shared importance across different organisations. The Google Arts & Culture platform allows objects to be contextualized within various categories. This timeline of masks, wherein the collection of Lisbon’s National Museum of Ethnology and Popular Art has been added, is one such example.
