Comparison of the two collections

Introduction

For this museum digital collections project, two museum collections from London were chosen for several important reasons. First, the collections and their associated museums may or may not have been represented in Europeana, and the opportunity to explore Europeana and its standards was enticing. Second, both collections are available to the public around the world and stand as examples of how our shared cultural heritage is and should be accessible globally without needing to travel unless people want to travel to see these collections in person. Third, both digital collections are very large and as a result, show more items in digital representation than their respective museums actually have on display in analog form, in the galleries. In short, that means that accessing the digital collections potentially offers online visitors a more complete exploration of the collection than would be available to visitors physically viewing what is on display in the museums themselves. Finally, I have a personal connection to both museums and their associated collections, which will be discussed in a later section.

Ultimately, the Posters collection at the London Transport Museum was chosen out of personal interest and experience; I was born in England and spent part of my childhood in London. I have visited several times since moving to the States and made frequent use of Transport for London’s (TfL) services on every visit and when I lived there. I have an Oyster transport card even today, and many fond memories of my adventures in the city, all made possible by TfL. The London Transport Museum really pushes the boundaries of what might be considered a museum collection, given that they house not only art, artifacts, and ephemera related to TfL, but also actual vehicles such as buses and rolling rail stock going back to the very first iterations of these items, at both their flagship Covent Garden location and their Acton Depot location in the suburbs. They even have a London Underground engine driving simulator that my son enjoys using when we visit. Their digital collection is almost exclusively digitized representations of analog items in their collection, including the vehicles and rolling stock, and their five-year plan that started in 2018 has a stated commitment to collection accessibility and goals around visibility of their collection as well as to their mission, which is to be the premier transportation museum in Europe.

The Victoria and Albert Museum is already regarded as one of the premier museums of the world, and while a comparison between this museum and the London Transport Museum may not seem fair, both physical collections were started within a few decades of each other and I would argue that the V&A, as it is commonly known, pushes the boundaries of what might be included in a museum collection, just in different ways to the London Transport Museum. My late mother once told me that the V&A is the perfect embodiment of the Victorian mindset: It is a huge collection of “stuff,” all neatly catalogued and seemingly inexhaustible, and I have to agree with her assessment. The V&A has four current locations around the United Kingdom and another one opening in East London in Fall, 2024, so the decision was made to focus on one of my favorite collections at the flagship location on Cromwell Road in South Kensington, which is the location I have visited most frequently. I have many personal connections to this location, which will be discussed in a later section, but in the case of the Fashion and Textiles collection, I freely admit that I love fashion, and that in particular I find historical fashion fascinating. A straight line can be drawn between the two items chosen from this collection, most of which is digitized and available online through the Collections portal at the V&A website, although sadly with varying image quality.

References

London Transport Museum. (2023). About. https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/about

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2023). The V&A Story. Accessed at https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/the-va-story 

History

Strictly speaking, the V&A is the older museum of the two studied for this project, having begun its life as the Museum of Manufacturing in the 1850s with the express goal of providing exemplary instances of human creativity and industry, largely for tradesmen. In 1899, Queen Victoria laid the first stone of what would become the flagship location on Cromwell Road in South Kensington, London, and the museum was promptly named after her and her late husband, Prince Albert. Interestingly, the London Transport Museum began not long after this date, as archives and collections for the nascent London metropolitan transportation system were gathered and stored at a variety of locations around the city, ending up in Clapham before being moved to the present location in Covent Garden (in the former Flower Market building) in 1980. Mass transportation in London was a going concern by the 1890s, when Queen Victoria was laying the first stone on Cromwell Road, so in that regard, the collections are comparable in age.

The V&A maintains a collection chronicling human creative, artisanal, and industrial efforts dating back 5000 years, with particular collection strengths in fashion and textiles, jewelry, Asian art, photography, furniture, glasswork and woodwork, visual representations of text, extremely recently created items under a specific “rapid response” collection mandate, and childhood artifacts and ephemera, particularly at the Museum of Childhood location. Initially conceived as a storehouse of high-quality examples and inspiration for 19th century craftsmen and designers, the museum has evolved into a seemingly endless collection of “things,” for lack of a better word, all of which must meet the museum’s high standards for quality, uniqueness, provenance, ethics, and accessibility. The V&A has a long history of making its collections available not only for public viewing but also for research, and as a research collection, it is used by designers, scholars, historians, and students alike, which I know firsthand as my own cousin did much of her Art History degree research there in the Jewellery collection (British spelling, as the collection is titled by the museum). The V&A began to make its collections available digitally in 2009 and has continued to add primarily digitized items and a few born-digital items to the online collection as time has gone by.

The London Transport Museum began its life as a collection and archive for the London metropolitan transportation system, now known as Transport for London (TfL). After being housed in several locations around London, including in Clapham fittingly near the busiest rail junction in Europe, Clapham Junction, the collection moved to its permanent location in the disused Flower Market building in Covent Garden, London, with most of the vehicles, rolling rail stock, and collection archives at the Acton Depot in the suburbs, in 1980, renaming as the London Transport Museum in 2000 to coincide with the renaming of the London transportation system to TfL. The museum strives to present a collection covering the history of public transportation in London dating back to its inception in the 19th century and its strategic five year plan, published in 2018, states that it intends to become the premier transportation museum in Europe and a flagship destination in London itself. London is rich with museum experiences and the London Transport Museum presents a unique opportunity to study the history of the actual transportation system used to convey people to all the other attractions London has to offer, including other museums, shopping, the theatre district, nightlife, parks, palaces, and restaurants. The metropolitan system in London was also partially responsible for the development of the greater London suburbs, with early London Underground posters advertising ease of access to houses for all classes, within London and outside central London, all of which is documented in the collections held by the museum. Digitization of the collection, including vehicles and rolling rail stock, began in 2015 and continues to this day, with a Google Culture collaboration premiering just before the pandemic.

References

London Transport Museum. (2018). The five-year plan for London Transport Museum: 2018 - 2023. Accessed at https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk > media > downloads.

London Transport Museum. (2023). About. https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/about

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2023). The V&A Story. Accessed at https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/the-va-story/

Collection policy

Collection policy differs significantly between the two museums. The V&A has a long-standing policy, covered in its Collection Policy statement available from the museum, that items must be exemplary in their field, their provenance must be known, and they must adhere to a strict ethical policy regarding their acquisition and donation. Since 2009, the V&A has reaffirmed their commitment to preserving items of cultural significance to the United Kingdom to prevent them leaving the country, as well as a commitment to increase and enhance their collections of 20th and 21st century items. Finally, the museum has a stated goal of increasing their digital collection and making as many items from the collection, primarily digitized representations of analog items but also born-digital items, available online for the public as well as researchers to access easily. Many of the items in the V&A’s digital collection are available through the Europeana aggregator, which points to robust metadata in the V&A collection as Europeana has a policy of rejecting any items that do not meet its stringent metadata standards. The V&A’s collections, both analog and digital, are wide-ranging and require collaboration between experts in several departments, another key factor outlined in their collection policy document. Some of their collections, and notably the Asian and Middle Eastern collections have been streamlined since the start of the 21st century, making access much more straightforward and allowing robust collaboration between experts on staff in different departments and likewise between staff and the public as well as outside scholars and researchers.

While the V&A does indeed include items from and about TfL in its collection, both analog and digital, they are part of a wider collection covering other subjects. The London Transport Museum does one thing and one thing only: Collect and display items relating to the metropolitan London transportation system, or TfL as it is now known. This includes vehicles, rolling rail stock, archival documents, art, posters, ephemera, and anything that the museum deems to be related to its collection policy. The museum only accepts donations from the public on an appointment basis and asks that members of the public not simply turn up with items for the museum’s consideration. Because the London Transport Museum began its life as a collection and archive and not as a standalone museum, their collection developed before their collection policy was set in stone. The collection of over 500,000 physical items in the museum’s collection, spread between the Covent Garden location and the Acton Depot location, which is also used as a storage area for certain physical items that are not currently on display including the bulk of the Posters collection discussed in this project, is rapidly being digitized in accordance with the museum’s five-year plan, published in 2018 and covering 2018 – 2023. Digitization began in 2015 and continues to this day, with high-quality scans and images made available through their Collections Online initiative. Metadata for many items remains incomplete and as a result, the digital collection is not included in the Europeana aggregator.

References

London Transport Museum. (2023). About. https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/about

London Transport Museum. (2023). Collections. https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections

London Transport Museum. (2018). The five-year plan for London Transport Museum: 2018 - 2023. Accessed at https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk > media > downloads.

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2009). Collections management policy. Accessed at http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/documents/collections_management_policy_revised.pdf

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2023). Collections. https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections?type=featured

Quality of images

The quality of the images and scans in both collections (Posters and Fashion and Textiles) is generally very good to excellent, but it is impossible to tell in either case what equipment or technology was used as none of this information is included in the metadata or anywhere easily accessible in either museum’s digital collections information. I base any assessment of image quality, therefore, on what I was able to see when zooming in as close as possible on the images in question and on my professional experience with digital photography in a previous career. In order to compare photos and scans at both locations, other items were considered that included these types of digital representations even though they were not analyzed for the project.

Generally speaking, the scan and photo quality at the London Transport Museum is better overall than at the V&A with some exceptions. Scans at both locations are complete and include the entire item being assessed, with edges, no glare, no exposure concerns, and maintaining artifacts such as print and copyright marks, paper discoloration, tears, and glue or other adhesive. Photos in both locations are complete and generally include more than one view of the digitized item in question and are at high enough resolution that zooming in on the item shows things such as fabric grain, stitches, and staining. In the case of photos of items in the Fashion and Textiles collection at the V&A, images for the two items studied were generally excellent, but I could not zoom in as much as I would have liked on the Vivienne Westwood gown, meaning that I could not accurately assess the images of the entire garment. High-resolution digital images nearly to the microscopic level were provided for the fabric used by the designer, but notably there was no photo of the back of the gown even though the back of the gown was described in some detail in the metadata, which I view as a glaring omission on the part of the curators. In the case of the 18th century sack dress, the item was shown in several views in its entirety (although, again, no views of the back of the gown, which is another glaring omission when discussing fashion photography) and the gallery included multiple detail photos of the fabric and the construction techniques used on the gown at a high level of detail. Photos in both cases were well-exposed, although it seems like the curators were going for a dramatic look in the case of the Vivienne Westwood gown. Interestingly, when exploring the Fashion and Textiles collection to determine which two items to analyze, I encountered several items that were represented by poorly exposed and badly staged photographs, and only one or two photos for each item in question, almost as if the item was photographed quickly at acquisition using nothing more than a cell phone camera and while the item was on a clothes hanger on the back of a door with other items visible in the frame. This is nothing short of ironic given that this is a Fashion and Textiles collection that includes several examples of fashion photography, so one can hope that these items just have not yet been staged for accurate photography and that they will be in future. Photos at the London Transport Museum are well-exposed and high-resolution and typically offer more than one view of the physical item being digitized. Items are properly staged and photographed completely, and the photo and scan quality seems to be consistent across digitized items in the collections, unlike at the V&A.

References

London Transport Museum. (2018). The five-year plan for London Transport Museum: 2018 - 2023. Accessed at https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk > media > downloads.

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2023). Digital [Blog]. https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/digital

Ease of access

Both collections and their respective housing museums were easy to find through Google and through the MCN Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, e-Learning, and Online Collections. The V&A Fashion and Textiles collection was also found through the Europeana aggregator, while the London Transport Museum Posters collection was not. Perhaps this is because the V&A submitted their collection to  Europeana, where some of it is included in the Europeana Fashion Project aggregated collection, and the London Transport Museum did not submit their collection, but given the discrepancies between the two collections’ metadata, I would offer that the V&A collection is in Europeana because it meets the rigorous metadata standards demanded by that aggregator. A quick search in Europeana does not bring up anything from or relating to the London Transport Museum while a quick search on the V&A in full does bring up several items. Notably, searching on Vivienne Westwood in Europeana did not bring up the digitized item studied here, but did bring up several other items from the designer, including a few at the V&A. Further regarding metadata, the metadata fields at the London Transport Museum were less complete than at the V&A, both in number of fields and completeness of data, although the museum does include a percentage complete note on the metadata of every digital collection item and explains how they handle incomplete metadata and metadata generally, continuing to add more information as it is discovered per item. The information in the metadata at the London Transport Museum included several text inconsistencies and typos, for lack of a better term, and this coupled with the lack of richness in the fields leads in a straight line to the inability to find the collection through the Europeana aggregator. Admittedly, I know about the museum (as well as the V&A), so I went looking for the collection, although any user could easily find the museum itself and its digital collections and the Posters collection specifically through Google based on my experiments with this. While the metadata at the V&A is much more complete in number of fields, breadth and depth of included information, consistency in notation, and notably, cross-referencing to other collections and even individual items, the collections do not have permanent digital identifiers for each item. Neither does the London Transport Museum, for that matter. This is of concern because it is no longer a question of if technology will either fail or become obsolete, but rather when it will become obsolete. Given that the V&A at least states in their collections that they do consider technology advances and obsolescence, especially for born-digital items, this oversight on the part of both museums in context of that statement at the V&A and the London Transport Museum’s statement that they intend to be seen as Europe’s premier transport museum seems strange. It certainly reduces continued public access to the collections and items within those collections over time as technology changes. Overall and within the museum websites themselves in comparison, the collections were easier to find and search at the London Transport Museum.

References

Europeana. (2023) Collections. https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections 

London Transport Museum. (2023). Collections. https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections

MCN. (2023). The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, e-Learning, and Online Collections. [Blog post]. https://mcn.edu/a-guide-to-virtual-museum-resources/

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2023). Digital [Blog]. https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/digital

Other meaningful differences between the Posters and the Fashion and Textiles collections

There are some significant differences between the two collections studied for this project. First, size: The collection at the V&A (both physical and digital) is significantly larger than the collection at the London Transport Museum, especially when considering the collection as a whole at each museum and the digital collections as a whole at each museum. The size of the individual collections studied were also different, but given that I was looking specifically at posters as an item and only posters with digital image representations at the London Transport Museum and I was looking at only the fashion portion of the Fashion and Textiles collection and then specifically at dresses and only at dresses with digital image representations, that method of comparing the collections puts them at a similar size. The main difference between the collections is scope. Even if you remove the Fashion and Textiles collection from the greater context of the V&A itself, whose collection overall has more variety than the collection at the London Transport Museum simply by definition and intent, the collection considered includes not only garments but parts of garments, accessories, underwear, corsetry and foundations, fashion photography, programs from fashion shows, and even some doll clothes, among other items. The Posters collection at the London Transport Museum includes posters, although the initial search on posters to find the collection did lead to a faceted search page that included items that mentioned posters or were related to posters, which were removed by limiting to Item: Poster in the search. Once that was complete, I was left with well over 5000 digitized posters and nothing else, making my search for two representative items very easy. This brings up another significant difference between the collections. While the V&A collection was technically easier to find through multiple internet entry points than was the London Transport Museum collection, the London Transport Museum’s Collections Online search page was much easier to use than the V&A faceted search page. The London Transport Museum even has a date slider on the Collections Online landing page to help you limit your search results before you even get to the faceted search page, and also includes a random item of the day on the entry page to spark viewer interest. The V&A online collections page is very well organized and includes thumbnails of featured collections that take the user to a faceted page with that collection already selected, reducing search time and parameters, but searching for “sack dress,” which is the first item considered in the Fashion and Textiles collection, in the search bar at the top of the online collections main page brought up nothing when I first tried the search. Entering “sack dress” in the search bar on the Fashion and Textiles collection page (because helpfully, it is a featured collection) brought me several results.

Another important difference between the collections is presentation of the items and metadata. The London Transport Museum metadata is much simpler and the digitized item records are very graphic and very user-friendly to the average member of the public. The V&A metadata and visual presentation of the items is closer to a technical catalogue or archive and geared to the public but more clearly geared to researchers and designers who may need to use the collection for projects or detailed study or design inspiration and reference. It is thorough, but perhaps less user-friendly for the casual patron, no matter how well-informed or educated that patron may be. In order to gain some perspective on this, I decided to look at yet another London museum’s digital collections and turned to my childhood favorite, the Natural History Museum on Brompton Road. I accessed the digital collections from the museum’s home page by selecting Our Science: Collections: Find a specimen. This took me to the museum’s Data Portal, which after some exploration proved to be an extremely robust database of digitized specimens as well as a digital humanities data set portal. Searching through the collections for butterflies ultimately showed me that, in the case of this museum, the digital collections are clearly designed for scientific research and not public access, even though they are relatively easily accessed from the home page. If I want to look at the museum’s collections as housed in the museum itself, I would need to look through the virtual galleries, starting at the home page. Perhaps the tradeoff between usability and data is exactly that: Highly robust and detailed metadata for a huge collection is given at the expense of user-friendliness and vice versa. In this case, the London Transport Museum has erred on the side of user-friendliness at the expense of detailed data, leading them to be excluded from Europeana, and the V&A has erred on the side of detailed data, which places them in Europeana but makes the digital collections less user-friendly, although not perhaps as non-user-friendly as the digital collections at the Natural History Museum. I am all in favor of data that supports research but I would argue that there needs to be a middle ground between research-level data and user-friendliness.

The final, and simplest difference between the two collections other than content (because garments and posters are obviously two very different things) is digitization priority and scope. The V&A has a stated long-term commitment to digitization of their vast collections and already has nearly two million collection items available in digital format. They also have a blog devoted to digital topics and API available for public use. The London Transport Museum is committed to digitizing their collections and is making strong progress with this, but started several years later than did the V&A (2015 to the V&A’s 2009) and has some significant hurdles to overcome in terms of metadata and the resulting findability of the items. Their five-year plan, starting in 2018 and ending this year, shows a planned commitment to the digital collections as well as the collection overall and given that this echoes the fact that this is a museum where the collection came before the mission and collection policy and not the other way around as it was at the inception of the V&A, one can only hope that the museum will follow that plan and continue to improve its digital collection, both in scope of items and completeness of data, leading to greater access overall.

References

London Transport Museum. (2018). The five-year plan for London Transport Museum: 2018 - 2023. Accessed at https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk > media > downloads.

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2023). Collections. https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections?type=featured

Victoria and Albert Museum. (2009). Collections management policy. Accessed at http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/documents/collections_management_policy_revised.pdf

Price, G. (2019, June 4). Digital collections: Over 500 maps, photographs, and posters from the London Transport Museum digitized and now available from Google Arts and Culture [Blog post]. Library Journal: Infodocket. Accessed at https://www.infodocket.com/2019/06/04/digital-collections-over-500-maps-photographs-posters-and-vehicles-from-the-london-transport-museum-digitized-and-now-available-from-google-arts-and-culture/

McGivern, H. (2021, February 9). Immerse yourself in V&A’s new digital platform of 1.2 million objects. [Blog post]. The Art Newspaper. Accessed at https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/02/09/immerse-yourself-in-vandas-new-digital-platform-of-12-million-objects

Why these two collections were selected and what has been learned

I chose these two collections for several reasons, but the primary reason is, in all honesty, I love both museums and I know both museums have excellent analog collections on their premises. I had initially thought to use museums local to me such as the Denver Art Museum (DAM) or the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) or even the Forney Transportation Museum, but I immediately ran into issues with each of those collections. The DMNS does not have a digitized collection that I could find and seems to follow the model of “we have to monetize everything,” which is disappointing. The DAM, while having both an excellent analog collection and a very good digital collection, had very little information on their collection policy for either of these formats and an email to the Asian Art curator went unanswered. The Forney Transportation Museum, while fantastic, has a very basic website and no access to digital collections other than a few photos of the analog collection items on the site. Casting a wider net (largely because I was still hoping to use the DAM collection) led me to the Brooklyn Museum, which has a solid digital collection with good metadata and searchability, but very little information that I could find on collection policy for digital and digitized items. Because of my familiarity both with the London museum scene and Europeana’s metadata standards, I then chose to look outside the United States and see if the two museums selected were indexed in Europeana. One was (the V&A) and one was not (London Transport Museum). In both cases, however, digital collections are robust and readily available through the museums’ websites and through other channels such as Google, in addition to Europeana for the V&A. Both museums have clear collection policy, both analog and digital, available online and both museums have strategic plans that include digital collections, including policy and goals.

Because of all this, it became very easy to access and assess the collections and because both museums have such clear collection policy overall, it was likewise easy to find two items in each selected collection that were representative not only of the collection but also of the wider museum in which they are housed. Interestingly, there is some one-way cross-pollination between the two museums: The V&A houses items related to Transport for London, specifically posters and the iconic Underground map, initially designed in its current “electrical circuit” form by Harry Beck in the 1930s. This makes sense, given that the V&A’s collection policy includes the statement that it is first and foremost a design museum with primary focus on the United Kingdom, so the Underground posters and the Underground map merit inclusion. The Posters collection at the London Transport Museum fits the museum’s mission and collection policy and both items clearly represent TfL history and the TfL’s long tradition of using poster art to advertise not only what is on in London at the moment, but also the easiest way to get there: The Underground. The scan quality for the two digitized items was excellent, which is helpful considering they are examples of graphic design and low-quality images or scans would have diluted their purpose. Given the museum’s stated goal of becoming Europe’s premier transportation museum, however, more thought and effort needs to go into each item’s metadata and the collection metadata overall, as it is not currently findable in Europeana, which is the likely first step in being recognized as such a museum.

The V&A presents nearly the opposite situation to the London Transport Museum in many important aspects. First, the collection chosen has nothing to do with transportation and includes completely different items to the London Transport Museum collection. It is tempting to go back to the V&A later to see what the metadata comprises for the London Underground posters in their collection and compare that with the metadata at the London Transport Museum. In addition to the collection chosen including items of completely different type and provenance to the London Transport Museum collection, as stated elsewhere the metadata is complete enough to allow indexing by Europeana, and even includes cross-references to Europeana aggregated collections and other cultural items that include mentions or representations of the items in question. The V&A also includes strong consideration of collection ethics and digital collection ethics in their collection policy and goals, by providing complete documentation of each item, several views, and wide access to collections. None of the items studied (in either collection) take technical obsolescence into account, though and therefore none of the four items across the two museums have permanent digital object identifiers other than their location on the respective museum’s websites. Especially in the case of the V&A, this is disappointing given that they do generally consider object lifecycle, especially for born-digital objects, and technology support for all born-digital and digitized items. There are also some important outages in imaging for the two items and for the Fashion and Textiles collection generally. While this collection is not primarily a photography collection, the wider collection does include items that are not garments but that are directly related to fashion, notably fashion photography. While both of the items studied here have several views (and in the case of the sack dress, 30 views including details), neither of the items includes a view of the back of the dress. In fashion photography, this is an important oversight, especially given that the metadata for both items describes the back of each gown. The Vivienne Westwood “Watteau” gown also does not include detail photos, replacing them with fabric grain detail images, representing the Textiles side of the Fashion and Textiles collection, although given that this is a work of fashion design and the stated mission of the V&A is to provide exemplary design examples to craftsmen and the public alike, it stands to reason that construction detail photos should be included, as they are for the 18th century sack dress. Because of my familiarity with historical fashion and because other sack dress digitized items in the V&A collection include views of the back of the dress, I know what the back of a sack dress is supposed to look like and have spent a fair amount of time trying to work out how to cut fabric to achieve the shape and drape of a sack dress. The example chosen for review was, therefore, chosen for other reasons, notably historical significance due to the date of construction immediately before the French Revolution. One could say the same about the Vivienne Westwood dress: It was constructed at the height of the 1990s “Cool Britannia” era, which has since fallen on hard times, notably after the double-punch of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, several items in the digital Fashion and Textiles that were considered for inclusion were dismissed out of hand due to what can only be described as poor image quality. For some of the garments in this collection, there are only one or two images, and these look to have been taken with a cell phone in the curation office while the item was hanging on the back of a door. In short, the items were photographed almost as proof that they were in the collection, but as of this week, no further attempt has been made by the V&A to create new digital images of the items that would meet the standards of the two items chosen for this project. This is ironic, given that this is a Fashion and Textiles collection that contains not only construction, detail, and fabric grain images of other items and of the textiles in the collection, but also fashion photography items.

Finally, in both collections, the accessibility of each item and the associated metadata was user-friendly for the general public, with the London Transport Museum being more geared toward public access than the V&A collection, which suits both the general public and researchers. As mentioned previously, another museum’s digital collections were studied to gain some perspective on the balance between public access and robust research data: The Natural History Museum in London. In this case, the museum’s digital collection is readily available online through the Our Science web page, which led to Collections and finally, Find a Specimen (or find a staff member). This led me to their Data Portal, giving me access to the museum’s vast holdings in digitized format. The problem was the data was overwhelming for the casual user. I am not a scientist, but I am also well-informed and I had no idea what to do with the data once I got to the collections. Perhaps the tradeoff is robust data or usability, although I think that the V&A has hit a good middle ground of accessibility, complete data, and complete digital collection.

References

de Klerk, T. (2018). Ethics in Archives: Decisions in Digital Archiving. Libraries News: Special Collections. Retrieved from: https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/news/special-collections/ethics-in-archives%3A-decisions-in-digital-archiving

Europeana. (2023) Collections. https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections 

Europeana. (2023). Home. https://www.europeana.eu/en 

Graze, M. (2020). Museums Are Going Digital—and Borrowing From Data Viz in the Process. Nightingale: The Journal of the Data Visualization Society. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/nightingale/museums-are-going-digital-and-borrowing-from-data-viz-in-the-process-b5e3828b4000

Lloyd-Baynes, F. (2019). When ‘Digital’ meets Collection: How do (traditional) museums manage? Museum Next. Retrieved from: https://www.museumnext.com/article/when-digital-meets-collection-how-do-traditional-museums-manage/

London Transport Museum. (2023). About. https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/about

London Transport Museum. (2023). Harry Beck, 1902-1974. Accessed at https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/people/item/1996-7354

MCN. (2023). The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, e-Learning, and Online Collections. [Blog post]. https://mcn.edu/a-guide-to-virtual-museum-resources/

Smith, C. (2023). Exploring Boston Museum of Fine Art collections. [Online lecture and slides]. Accessed at https://kent.instructure.com/courses/54087/pages/watch-exploring-boston-museum-of-fine-art-collections?module_item_id=2664661

Smith, C. (2023). Exploring Cleveland Museum of Art collections. [Online lecture and slides]. Accessed at https://kent.instructure.com/courses/54087/pages/watch-exploring-cleveland-museum-of-arts-collections?module_item_id=2664660

Smith, C. (2023). Introduction to museum collections. [Online lecture and slides]. Kent State University. Accessed at https://kent.instructure.com/courses/54087/pages/watch-introduction-to-museum-digital-collections?module_item_id=2664658

Smith, C. (2023). Searching Europeana. [Online lecture and slides]. Kent State University. Accessed at https://kent.instructure.com/courses/54087/pages/watch-searching-europeana?module_item_id=2664642