2017 IIIF Conference - The Vatican

The physical separation of museums, the constraints of space, the fragility of rare and valuable objects and above all the culture of regarding those objects as singular possessions: these are the things that conspire to prevent museum objects from being reconnected with their history, with ideas and with the people who have interest in them or knowledge about them.

This talk is about the museum without walls; it combines two case studies from the V&A Museum, carried out in collaboration with Made by Many, that demonstrate the power of the networked digital artefact to overcome these constraints, and transform curation into a collective pursuit. The first examines parts of a very large Qing dynasty dinner service held in seven different museums (including the V&A, British Museum and Metropolitan Museum); it explores the extraordinary effect of using digital data to re-combine the different pieces of the service distributed throughout museums and private collections, from Chennai to New York. The second study, currently at prototyping and feasibility stage, demonstrates the value of using APIs to form a networked archive across multiple museums to create a rich platform for the study of Islamic Architecture. It seeks to combine two or more of the existing archives of Sir K.A.C. Creswell’s early 20th Century photography of Islamic architecture in the Middle East, held in the V&A, the American University in Cairo, the Ashmolean Museum, Harvard Library and the Villa I Tatti Center. Creswell’s 20,000 or so photographs and negatives constitute an invaluable and systematic record for both building conservation and emergency archaeology.