Collections without Borders: Sustaining Digital Content at Cultural Institutions

A Case Study of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia

Sarah Pickle and Nancy L. Maron, Ithaka S+R

While institutions continue to develop an array of digital content, and products, they often do so without giving enough consideration to the ongoing efforts and resources required to ensure their long-term viability. This case study explores how the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) successfully conceived and implemented a strategy to digitize its permanent collection and develop a durable database infrastructure. It offers a number of lessons for other institutions looking for ways to develop their own capacities and infrastructures, even if that development is more modest or takes place incrementally. The case study also features a useful Health Check Tool for Digital Content Creators in Cultural Heritage Institutions, developed in conjunction with the U.K.'s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the U.S.-based Ithaka S+R.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Museum of Anthropology (MOA) digital strategy case study methodology
• Sustaining digital collections funding in Canada
• Museum of Anthropology (MOA) is a leader in digital strategy
• Collection digitization process and tools will support your strategy
  • MOA CAT and Collection Online
  • Reciprocal Research Network
• Curatorial digital projects
• Catalogue, document and protect museum's digital content for future use
• Digital content analytics and insights on online users
• Common challenges in sustainability of digital assets
  • Keeping pace with a growing collection
  • Deep expertise, but no succession plan
  • Integrating valuable assets beyond the main collection
  • Ongoing funding
• 9 steps to digital sustainability success for the Museum of Anthropology (MOA)
  • A central infrastructure for digital assets
  • An articulated workflow to expand the digital collection
  • An inclusive approach to designing a digital strategy
  • User-centered experiences
  • Agile development process
  • Realistically assessing the future needs of digital resources at the outset
  • Looking beyond the catalogue
  • Finding the balance between centralized and distributed responsibilities
  • Identifying partners to create a wider network of support
• Interviewees on the digital case study of the Museum of Anthropology (MOA)
  • Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia
  • Landscape review
• Digital strategy case study interview guide of the Museum of Anthropology (MOA)
  • Background of Interviewee
  • Digital Strategy
  • Process
  • Impact
  • Financial Sustainability
  • Landscape
• A museum professional tool to help digital content creators with sustainability issues
  • Introductory guide to the Health Check Tool for digital content creators in cultural heritage institutions
    • Taking the pulse of your digital resources
    • Digital collections
    • Online exhibitions
    • Educational resources
    • Software projects
  • Health Check Tool for digital content creators in cultural heritage institutions
    • Description of the project
    • Ongoing Support
    • Preservation standards checklist
    • Audience, usage, and impact
    • Evaluate the risks
    • Next steps and timeline
• Bibliography for the case study on museum digital content sustainability

Introduction

For nearly two decades, investment from private and public funders has helped to create a rich landscape of digital resources in cultural heritage institutions across the globe. These projects and initiatives, whether focused on digitization, born-digital content, or other tools for learning or research, are often complex, drawing on the skills and time of people in many departments. Once created and well after the initial investment has been spent, these resources often still require some ongoing management, technology development or editorial enhancement, and preservation if they are to be sustained. Yet it can be challenging for museums and other organizations to develop reliable models for long-term support of this work, especially for those projects that begin with grant funding.

The great promise of the digital environment as both a preservation solution and an outreach tool has encouraged many cultural heritage organizations to seek support from public and private funders to enable them to create digitized collections of their physical holdings. Doing so has helped them to protect the materials from physical wear from handling and to preserve them for future use. ^{Footnote 1} An additional benefit of digitization has been that sharing these materials online can help expand the audience for these institutions' rare and unique collections far beyond their physical buildings, potentially to anyone with an internet connection. As a result, many museums today use their websites not just to offer notices of opening times and ongoing exhibitions, but to share a substantial part of their collections, sometimes even more than what one might see when visiting their physical spaces. ^{Footnote 2}

Museums are also exploring various types of digital development, beyond creating digital surrogates of the objects in their collections. For example, amateur detectives can solve forensic mysteries on the Montréal Science Centre's online game "Autopsy of a Murder," and art historians can label or tag selections from the digital collection on the BBC's Your Paintings. ^{Footnote 3} Budding curators can build their own collections on the Rijksmuseum's Rijksstudio site, and film producers can purchase videos for reuse from lightboxes they assemble on the Imperial War Museums' webpage. ^{Footnote 4} The Old Port of Montréal also launched a mobile application called "Wintering" in 2013, which former Head of Heritage Carol Pauzé hopes will shape the way the community understands the heritage site. Because the Old Port is a public park with no physical building, the application attempts to demonstrate the coherence of the institution by guiding users around the grounds and sharing its history. ^{Footnote 5}

Museums have come to realize just how important digital platforms can be both for preserving and sharing their collections and for engaging with patrons in new and multifaceted ways. As Bill Greenlaw, Executive Director for Archives, Museums and Libraries in the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage in Nova Scotia, puts it, the museums he oversees "are viewed as a public good in [the province]," but their role in society is changing with the times; "there needs to be social relevance" to the work they are doing, and, more often than not, these institutions' online presence will be the major factor in determining that relevance.

Canada is home to more than 2,500 museums that attract over 59 million visitors every year. For Canadian institutions that wish to create digital projects and software but require outside funding to do so, the only significant funder are provincial and federal governments. Unlike in the United States and Europe, where, in addition to federal agencies, private foundations and individual donors are key sources of support, there is little private money for the development of digital content in Canada.

This situation makes the question of sustainability all the more urgent: how can those who manage digital content best take advantage of the resources they do have? Given that so little is available for new digital initiatives, what can museums do to support the materials that are already available and ensure that they have the impact their creators desire?

With support from the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), a special operating agency within the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, Ithaka S+R has undertaken a study to examine the systems and practices in place to aid the creation and ongoing management of digital content at museums in Canada. Rather than a broad assessment of the complex landscape of Canadian cultural heritage institutions and the many and varied challenges they face, this project was conceived as a case study of one such institution, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), as a way to understand in some detail how MOA is actively developing a strategy to address both the opportunities that digital media afford and the challenges that they can pose. ^{Footnote 6}

While case studies are by definition explorations of very specific instances of a particular phenomenon, examining digital creation and sustainability strategies that appear to be working can offer useful models for others facing similar challenges. Although MOA is one of the few Canadian organizations that has undertaken the mass digitization of its permanent collection, it is far from the only institution currently grappling with how to sustain its digital assets in view of the current economic climate. It is our hope that this study will be useful for others at cultural heritage institutions who are creating digital resources and considering strategies for how best to support that content.

Museum of Anthropology (MOA) digital strategy case study methodology

This study builds on the Ithaka S+R report Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content, published in January 2013 and funded by the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance, which examined the role of host institutions in supporting the creation and ongoing management of digital content created by project leaders at universities, libraries, and museums in the United Kingdom. ^{Footnote 7} While that report focused primarily on scholar-produced materials on university campuses and included a detailed case study of University College London, it also delved into the cultural sector, examining how two major institutions, the National Library of Wales and the Imperial War Museums, are addressing a similar set of questions: How are digital resources created, and what motivates the decision to digitize? What technical and personnel structures are in place to support that activity? Because museums and libraries—unlike universities—tend to start with a collecting and preserving mission, how are their policies and workflows for managing digital content different from those at higher education institutions? Given the potential for increased interaction with the content that the internet provides, how are cultural institutions understanding and developing their online audiences?

In early 2012, CHIN contacted Ithaka S+R to explore the possibility of undertaking an additional case study from the Canadian cultural heritage sector, which could permit a deeper exploration of the strategies in place at museums. Together the Ithaka S+R research team and CHIN staff determined that it would be most valuable to study an institution that demonstrated a high degree of digital activity and evidence of a digital strategy already in place, as had been the case with both UK-based case studies of cultural institutions. Yet, while the UK cases offered many valuable examples, both the Imperial War Museums and the National Library of Wales are large organizations. The site recommended by CHIN—the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, which has a $4 million (CAD) operating budget and around 38,000 ethnographic objects—is of a moderately large size and would likely be seen as a useful and accessible model for a wider range of organizations. It also has the added benefit of being embedded at a research university, which would potentially make MOA's story more interesting to similar organizations on campuses or with a research focus. Additionally, CHIN wanted to identify an institution that negotiates a complex web of relations with its stakeholders, which MOA does in its collaborations with First Nations communities and other cultural heritage organizations. An initial discussion with MOA Information Manager Ann Stevenson surfaced several encouraging avenues to explore, including the Museum's shift to a common database for all its digital assets and the many ways in which that core database of materials is being exploited for a wide range of uses.

Over the course of four months, the Ithaka S+R team conducted desk research to gain a sense of the dynamics at play in the Canadian cultural heritage funding landscape, the types of digital strategies evident at other cultural institutions, and the range of digital activities that are undertaken by curators, outreach coordinators, and others in these organizations. To deepen our knowledge of comparable institutions, the team worked with CHIN staff to identify leaders of six Canadian cultural organizations and conducted interviews in order to understand support for the creation and ongoing management of their digital projects and initiatives, the value that their museums see in the investments they are making, and the ways the museums measure their success. ^{Footnote 8} We also spoke with CHIN staff to learn more about the support the agency provides museums for the development of digital projects. Interviews followed an interview guide developed by Ithaka S+R with input from staff at CHIN. ^{Footnote 9} Most conversations were conducted by phone and lasted approximately 60 minutes, though in one case, a respondent chose to answer queries by email.

To develop a clear and deep understanding of the policies and practices in place at MOA, the Ithaka S+R research team spent two days onsite with Ann Stevenson and her colleagues in Vancouver, conducting individual and group interviews. During this time, we met with seventeen staff at the Museum, including the director, senior administrators and managers, curators, web developers, and an exhibit designer. Most meetings lasted about 60 minutes, though several ran longer, as needed. With the permission of the interviewees, interviews were recorded to permit the researchers to review them in more detail. In addition, a lunchtime roundtable invited all MOA staff to discuss sustainability issues in an informal setting, learn more about the Ithaka S+R team's research agenda, and ask the researchers specific questions concerning the project.

During the interviews, several MOA staff who manage digital projects or initiatives were also asked to provide feedback on a "health check tool," originally developed as part of the Jisc study with the assistance of Lorna Hughes and her colleagues at the National Library of Wales. Feedback from Stevenson and her colleagues helped us to revise the tool to the institution's needs and to better reflect the ongoing support required for the different types of digital assets they manage: the Museum's digitized collection, online exhibitions, educational resources, and related software. Feedback from this group has been instrumental in developing the final form of the Health Check Tool, available in the section, "Health Check Tool for digital content creators in cultural heritage institutions" of this report and online and preceded by a guide for digital content creators in cultural heritage organizations. ^{Footnote 10}

We offer our sincere thanks to the many people who contributed to this case study, which was made possible by the support of the Canadian Heritage Information Network. We especially thank Paul Lima and Sheila Carey at CHIN for their guidance, assistance, and encouragement throughout this project.

Several members of the Canadian museum community generously shared with us in depth information about the inner workings of their institutions, helping us to better understand the digital landscape in Canada. Special thanks are due to Janet Carding and Mark Engstrom of the Royal Ontario Museum; Bill Greenlaw of the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage; Carol Pauzé of the Montréal Science Centre; Stephanie Poisson of the McCord Museum; and Caroline Riedel of the Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery. Invaluable feedback on early drafts of the paper was provided by Deanna Marcum, our colleague at Ithaka S+R, as well as several staff at CHIN and MOA.

Ann Stevenson of MOA served as the research team's main point of contact at the Museum throughout the project. She coordinated our site visit, scheduling interviews and guiding our growing understanding of the history and current structure of the organization, and we are deeply appreciative of her help. She and her colleagues at MOA, including Director Anthony Shelton, warmly welcomed us into their museum, patiently sharing with us rich detail about the transformative changes that have been underway in the organization since 2001, taking the time both to look back and speculate about the future. Although many individuals graciously shared their time to support our work, the responsibility for the contents herein remains with the authors.

Sustaining digital collections funding in Canada

For much of the cultural heritage sector in Canada, concerns about the sustainability of digital resources often focus on obtaining financing for this activity in the first place. Virtually all financial support for creating digital resources there has come from governmental agencies, which has not been the case in Europe and the United States, where this funding is disbursed by both public and private partners and donors. In Europe, the Comité des Sages—a panel of experts convened on behalf of the European Union to make recommendations concerning the future directions of digitization policy in the EU—has encouraged the involvement of private sector partners, such as Arcadia in the United Kingdom, in the digitization of public domain materials for the government-funded web portal Europeana. ^{Footnote 11} In the United States, federal agencies, such as the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, provide money for the production of digital content in museums, libraries, and archives, but so do individual philanthropists and organizations from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

The first major investment in cultural heritage online by the Canadian government was made in 1997 with the creation of the Multimedia Investment Fund, which was distributed through the federal Department of Canadian Heritage. ^{Footnote 12} Over the following decade, the federal government created additional support streams for museums, libraries, and archives through several branches of and programs within the Canadian Heritage portfolio of organizations, such as the Canadian Culture Online Strategy and Library and Archives Canada. In the case of the latter, which itself is a memory institution that acquires and preserves the documentary heritage of the country, this job was accompanied by the additional responsibility of digitizing the materials in the LAC's own collection. In addition to Canadian Heritage, provincial governments, principally those of British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, helped to foster the growth of digital content in their local universities, libraries, and archives, and research-focused government-related agencies, such as Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, also contributed to digital projects in cultural heritage institutions that engage in research. ^{Footnote 13}

In general, while support provided to libraries and archives targeted projects undertaking the mass digitization of documentary materials, funders of digital work in museums took an approach more reflective of the curatorial work of those institutions, backing the creation of interpretive, contextual, and sometimes even interactive digital resources. ^{Footnote 14} CHIN, for instance, sought to "[enable] Canada's museums to engage audiences through the use of innovative technologies" through its Virtual Exhibits Investment Program (investments of up to $250,000, about ten productions per year) and the Community Memories Investment Program (up to $5,000, about 40 productions per year by institutions with five or fewer full time equivalent staff). ^{Footnote 15} Together, these funds disbursed close to $23.6 million between 2001 and 2012 for the creation of online exhibitions, interactive and educational resources, and virtual tours.

While libraries, archives, and museums in Europe and the United States can continue to apply for European Commission and federal money to fund mass digitization, cultural heritage organizations in Canada interested in that work must primarily pull together support from their institutions' own resources. As a result, some innovative new models for funding digitization have begun to emerge, including the development of partnerships that can reduce the financial burden on individual institutions by distributing associated costs across several institutions. ^{Footnote 16}

Facing this funding landscape while still holding on to the big hopes expressed for digital resources just a decade or so ago, many museum, library, and archive professionals and their supporters are concerned about the future of the documentary and cultural heritage of Canada. Even leaders of the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver—an institution with the staff and robust technological infrastructure to support this activity, all backed by a carefully thought out digital strategy—recognize that they will face challenges ahead when the major funding that helped to build their digital collection runs out.

Museum of Anthropology (MOA) is a leader in digital strategy

Nestled behind indigenous plants and grasses and looking onto the Strait of Georgia, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) rests on Musqueam First Nations territory on the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Vancouver. Like its physical location, the scope of the Museum is both firmly rooted in MOA's local environment and positioned to serve as an opening to the wider world. An institution with a mission to "inspire understanding of and respect for world arts and cultures," MOA has welcomed the digital transition taking place in the cultural heritage sector, viewing it as an opportunity to extend its influence and more broadly serve its research and teaching mission. ^{Footnote 17} In the words of Director Anthony Shelton, the digital environment enables the Museum to "concretize [its] values of access and democratization," both sharing and soliciting knowledge via the web.

To this end, the Museum has developed a digital strategy that relies heavily on the technological infrastructure it has created in order to support the three online platforms through which it shares its digitized collection with the public. In building the central, back-end databases that house all its master files and consistent, detailed metadata, MOA has a laid solid foundation that allows the Museum to share that core content on- and offsite in a variety of ways with various audiences ranging from students and teachers to academic researchers.

Collection digitization process and tools will support your strategy

MOA is nearly unique among Canadian museums in that it has digitized 90% of its ethnographic collection, which comprises more than 40,000 objects, including textiles, ceramics, tools, and toys from every continent except Antarctica. ^{Footnote 18} That it was able to do this is due in no small part to its status as a research organization, as a part of the University of British Columbia, and timely encouragement from a board member of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), an independent, non-governmental organization created by the Canadian government in 1997. Prior to 2000, CFI's grantmaking had been limited largely to the sciences, but the board member saw an opportunity and suggested MOA apply for funds to improve its research support infrastructure.

Making the case for securing research funding for the Museum did not require a huge conceptual leap. After all, as a department of UBC, the Museum of Anthropology is a true teaching museum with two of the curatorial staff and the Director holding appointments both in the Museum and in the Department of Anthropology. In addition, the Conservator teaches courses in conservation, both the Head of the Curatorial Department and the Associate Director for Research have offered university courses in museum studies, and the Curator of Education and Public Programs teaches in the Faculty of Education. Many other staff members contribute to instruction by giving lectures, demonstrating collections tasks in labs, and holding workshops.

Ruth Phillips, the MOA Director at the time they began to consider applying for CFI funding, was also a researcher and had already expressed an interest in enhancing the Museum's facilities to accommodate further research activity. In addition, current conditions at the museum suggested that the time for an upgrade had come. Staff had noticed that the system visitors to the museum used to search for objects was woefully out of date, requiring people to consult printouts stored in at least a dozen sets of large binders housing MOA's collection records. Mindful that the binders were not a sustainable solution, the Museum decided that its next phase of collection record development would help make this information more accessible.

MOA's bid for CFI funding outlined a pledge to develop "a new infrastructure for collaborative research," bringing together the MOA staff with the various communities it works with and creating better physical and virtual environments for academic study and collaboration. ^{Footnote 19} The award, which at the time was at least three times bigger than the next-largest CFI grant to a social science department, was viewed as a major achievement for an academic department in a Faculty of Arts. The CFI funds were then matched by the British Columbia Knowledge Department Fund, and an additional 20% was supplemented from UBC. All together, the full award came to more than $40 million (CAD) dedicated to a major "renewal project" that would improve not only the Museum's building but also the accessibility of its holdings—jewelry, drawings, ceramics, masks, sculptures, clothing, and more from around the globe. Included in this undertaking were the digitization of the collection and the overhaul of the collection and information management systems, aimed at facilitating both internal processes and external access to the collection.

Given the large investment MOA was about to make, Information Manager Ann Stevenson, IT Manager Mawuena Glymin, and their colleagues devoted considerable time to designing and building an infrastructure that could serve as the home of all the Museum's digital assets. Of primary importance at this stage was the storage of the images and data being produced from the digitization of MOA's permanent collection. Ensuring the integrity of those digital files and sustaining the work involved in producing them required the staff involved in their production to develop a strict workflow that is still followed today. Image surrogates are created and ingested into the Museum's back-end databases—MediaBank, its digital asset management system (DAMS), and Mimsy, the collections management software (CMS) that contains all the records of its holdings—along with robust and consistent metadata ensuring those assets can be searched and sorted for simple discovery and use. In creating this workflow, Stevenson and her colleagues aimed to establish a clear and smooth process for digitization that could be sustained as MOA's collection expands.

Digitization of the collection, which took place between 2007 and 2010 during the CFI grant period, was part of a larger initiative called the Collections Research Enhancement Project (CREP). Staffing for CREP included five permanent MOA employees, and the Museum also hired at least seven temporary, onsite staff to handle the objects, take pictures, and then ingest the images. A major benefit of doing this work within the Museum's own walls was that it could build capacity among the permanent staff for the methodologies and workflow still in place.

Today, MOA has a standing policy that all new materials brought into its permanent collection, whether through purchase or donation, are digitized after acquisition. Collections Manager Nancy Bruegeman and an assistant manage the first step of the process, ensuring that the part-time photographer makes a digital surrogate and transfers the images and metadata to the CMS. But Bruegeman has other responsibilities at the Museum as well, such as taking care of the physical collection, and the organization has limited funds for digitization. With current staffing, they can dedicate one day per week to this work, which covers approximately 1,000 items per year; when objects are acquired at a higher rate than the current digitization schedule can accommodate, a backlog develops and Bruegeman must prioritize the digitization of objects. The ones that are photographed first are typically those requiring images for appraisal for insurance or tax purposes, or those that are part of upcoming exhibitions.

Once the digital image records and associated metadata are created, Bruegeman manages rights clearances and publishing flags, and the information about the digital assets she creates are incorporated into the DAMS by Stevenson. From that point, Bruegeman and Stevenson feed these data into the three public versions of the Museum's catalogue: the MOA CAT, the Collection Online, and the Research Reciprocal Network (see Figure 1 below). ^{Footnote 20}

The Museum of Anthropology has built a system to manage its digitized collection and offer a variety of customized public platforms to different types of users. This diagram is intended to illustrate how the "back-end" DAMS and CMS together feed a variety of public sites, from the general museum catalogue (MOA CAT; Collection Online) to a specialized resource for anthropology researchers (the Reciprocal Research Network), which itself includes content from partner institutions and offers a variety of points of access. Note that, despite this highly coordinated infrastructure, there are still some categories of content—such as the assets curators collect that do not officially become part of the museum collection—that still remain outside the bounds of this system.

With the collection digitized and cataloged, there are several different ways it is used, in order to maximize its value to the research community and to MOA's wider audience. The sections below outline the public-facing uses of the Museum's digitized collection.

Curatorial digital projects

MOA's digital assets are not limited to its collection-based platforms. Five of the six curators on staff are trained anthropologists, and several of them mount exhibitions in any given year. In 2012, Africa/Pacific Curator Carol Mayer's "Visions of Enlightenment" showcased the basic symbols and sacred images in Buddhist art, and Pacific Northwest Curator Jennifer Kramer's "Kesu'" shared the carvings and paintings of Kwakwaka'waka artist Doug Cranmer. These exhibitions are typically informed by the curators' own field research, during which they often amass a significant amount of media, from interviews and oral histories of indigenous peoples to photographs of community buildings and recordings of carvers creating totem poles.

Throughout the curatorial process, MOA staff both gather and create a variety of digital assets. In addition to the research materials the curators produce, in-house staff document the entire process of preparing, mounting, and organizing public programming (lectures, discussions) around an exhibition. Once the records are made, the curators take their cameras and other equipment to Gerald Lawson, the Oral History Lab Coordinator, so that he can transfer the files, standardize them for use and potential re-use on multiple platforms, and place them into folders accessible to the curators on the Museum's networked hard drive.

In addition to the curators' activities related to formal exhibitions, they also find innovative ways to communicate their expertise through technology. For example, to share additional images from an exhibition with a community in which she had worked, Kramer enlisted Glymin to develop a proof-of-concept and Broome to hire an outside web developer to create an iPad kiosk. Glymin also created an iPad kiosk with films and photographs to supplement the "One Heart, One Mind" installation, which ran through April 2013.

Some bigger projects require curators to turn to outside sources of financial support. In 2010, Karen Duffek created a webzine "borderzones.ca" that aimed to reveal "the ideas behind the exhibit" she curated, called Border Zones: New Art across Cultures. ^{Footnote 25} The website had an external project manager and designer, and its creation was backed in part by the exhibition's major supporter, Canada Council, which was just one funder among seven. Similarly, "The 'Respect to Bill Reid' Pole" website launched in 2002 by Bill McLennan, who is now a curator, Broome, and others at the MOA was made possible by an investment from CHIN's Virtual Exhibits Investment Program. The latest project to receive support is the "Voices of the Canoe" website, which was created by Curator of Education and Public Programs Jill Baird, Damara Jacobs, and several colleagues and will launch in the first half of 2013. With support from the History Education Network (THEN/HiER), the site uses oral histories and stories to encourage secondary school students to think about the ways different cultures from around the Pacific Ocean conceptualize and narrate history and memory.

Whether they are developed internally "off the sides of peoples' desks," as Baird put it, or with the help of grants, these projects exist as stand-alone efforts. While some, such as "Voices of the Canoe," may draw images and data from the main, CMS-backed collection, they also produce significant digital assets of their own; but these files and data do not generally become part of the same technological infrastructure that supports the MOA CAT, Collection Online, and the RRN.

Instead, the vast digital resources—images, videos, oral histories and interviews, essays, source books on mounted exhibitions—that are featured in these projects typically end up living in protected folders on network hard drives and on increasingly outmoded storage media in bins stacked inside the cubicles of the curators who created them. There is, however, a push among certain staff to treat these materials as they already do the records of formal exhibitions by integrating them into the institutional archives.

Catalogue, document and protect museum's digital content for future use

Overcoming the challenge of sustaining the digital assets that are not, strictly speaking, part of the formal museum collection is something Stevenson, Glymin, Lawson and their colleague Kriszina Laszlo, the Museum's archivist, have pondered for quite some time.

The aim of the archives at MOA is to catalogue and protect the Museum's institutional memory both for potential future re-use by people who work in the organization and, because it is a teaching museum, for the museological record. The major value of the archives resides in the collections (series or "fonds") Laszlo assembles from the materials produced by the curators and other staff involved in creating content. The items she catalogues and stores include resources as diverse as research materials (audio and video recordings, photographs, field notes) and meticulously recorded exhibition documentation.

The vast majority of the objects in the archives is still analog; but as the digital assets of the institution continue to grow, Laszlo and her colleagues would like for the content creators to deposit their files in the DAMS, beside those of the permanent collection. From there, they could be catalogued and ingested into the archives' own database, ICA AtoM, and then cross-referenced with similar resources and re-used by other staff once the materials are known to exist and are accessible.

This campaign is, in a sense, an effort to integrate the ad-hoc project-based work into the larger programs underlying MOA's digitized collection, but thus far it has been largely unsuccessful. Some curators are hesitant to hand off their raw materials—videos, audio tapes, culturally sensitive objects, etc.—without a careful selection process and without providing proper context; in other words, without curating them. Yet, as Mayer emphasized, if these files could be carefully chosen and organized before being ingested into MediaBank, her knowledge and that of her colleagues still would not be transparent in the DAMS's records, and that knowledge is integral to the work and value of the Museum.

Digital content analytics and insights on online users

In 2011, more than 137,000 visitors crossed the Museum's threshold, and MOA takes great care to foster a deep awareness and understanding of the local, and especially indigenous, communities it serves and with whom it works. The renovation of the Museum building produced designated rooms for viewing specific culturally sensitive objects; the RRN provides a platform for First Nations and other communities to share their knowledge about MOA's holdings and thereby help complete or correct the Museum's metadata; and the in-gallery MOA CAT kiosks take into account the literacy and potential disabilities of their users.

Yet, despite their deep relationships with and sensitivities to their physical visitors and collaborators, MOA staff generally know little about their online users, including users of the other collection-based interfaces and whether their experiences using the sites are positive. Only a few basic numbers are available. In 2012, Google Analytics revealed that the Collection Online averaged around 100 visitors a day, with little change over time, while WebLog Expert demonstrated that the onsite MOA CAT, which includes the 14 kiosks in the Multiversity Galleries and staff computers, had an average of a little more than 20,000 page views per day.

Common challenges in sustainability of digital assets

Over the past ten years, MOA has invested a significant amount of effort and resources in developing its accessibility to researchers and to the communities it serves, and a great deal of that investment has been dedicated to the improvement and expansion of its digital infrastructure and assets. However, along with this growth, certain challenges have surfaced about the sustainability of what is created.

9 steps to digital sustainability success for the Museum of Anthropology (MOA)

The Museum of Anthropology (MOA) has achieved what many of its peer institutions have not yet been able to, namely, the digitization of its permanent collection and development of a supporting database infrastructure, activities which were largely possible because of MOA's research focus and relatively small size.

To some extent, the Museum was in the right place at the right time. When it received the CFI grant, CFI had primarily supported science research and had not yet invested significantly in digitization or in a department in a faculty of arts. But by grounding its proposal in the organization's own research mission, MOA was able to secure a major award whose impact will endure well beyond the term of the grant.

Other museum leaders are also seeking new and innovative sources of support for digital work. Mark Engstrom, Deputy Director of Collections and Research at ROM, is looking for clever approaches, including fundraising, to support the further development of his institution's extensive online resources. A recent example is the mobile application created at ROM to augment the 2012 exhibition "Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants from Godwana," which was sponsored by the financial company Raymond James Ltd. ^{Footnote 27} Despite this one success, Engstrom is still unsure of how they will raise money going forward.

Given the current challenges of the Canadian funding landscape, it has been difficult for many other organizations to identify funding sources for projects of the scale of MOA's. Nevertheless, there are a handful of strategies that MOA has used to support its digital work that offer useful models for other institutions that may be looking for ways to develop their own capacities and infrastructures, even if that development is more modest or must take place incrementally.

Interviewees on the digital case study of the Museum of Anthropology (MOA)

Digital strategy case study interview guide of the Museum of Anthropology (MOA)

A museum professional tool to help digital content creators with sustainability issues

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