Digital Storytelling is an engaging way to open up Digital Collections to wider audiences. As discovered by Libraries, Museums and Archives alike, it helps users discover content without having to know the technical terminology to access it in a catalog.

E.g, suppose a photo archive has a collection of historical photographs. Chances are low that in the description field of the catalogue, one would use a term like “vintage photography”, while that would come to mind in the general public. It is less probable that a non-specialized user would know photographic techniques such a “Wet Collodion” or “Silver Gelatine”, while these might have been included in the catalog.

It is here that Digital Storytelling comes into play. Just like a curator would add explanatory texts to an exhibition, a Digital Storyteller can provide accessible stories that introduce the collection or subject to the audience. The title of such a story might as well be “Through the Lens: A Journey through our Vintage Photography Collections”.

When we look at the current practice in Museum websites, such stories are often published in the context of running exhibitions. The reason is obvious: in this case, a lot of curational effort is being done to select a collection, imagine a concept, documentation and research. It is less a practice for the permanent exhibitions or not exhibited collections, as those are often much larger and it would not make sense to highlight them all at once.

A disadvantage of exhibition-based storytelling is that often a temporary exhibition is partly based on external works, not owned by the museum. Once the exhibition is over, these stories tend to disappear from the website – something that could also be inspired by copyright arrangements during the lending process. Also, the texts prepared for such exhibitions are seldom integrated in the core databases of the museum – they stay on panels and maybe in some word documents that have been exchanged between the curators and the layout people. There must be a treasure trove of such documents on Museum SharePoints.

Libraries tend to focus more on storytelling for their own collections, in an effort to make their holdings known to a wider public. In this case, Digital Storytelling efforts often go hand in hand with further metadata enrichment in the catalogue.

This is an important issue that also Museums should address more properly. Currently, digital catalogues – certainly those of public institutions – still have rather poor descriptions, except for “special collections”. In essence, the whole point of the original paper catalogues was to actually find the object in storage. When these paper cards were digitised, they held relatively few descriptive data. This of course has radically changed over time, and current metadata are often quite richer in content.

First of all, through extranet applications often libraries can import data straight from the book publisher catalogues or content brokers. This frees up manpower to add descriptive metadata to enhance findability and discovery. This is far less evident for the museum objects that are in storage, and certainly for the many miles of unopened archival documents.

But even when we are talking about well-documented collection objects, digitisation offers new opportunities to enhance metadata: namely the aggregation of information from different online sources. The latter can partly be automated through various methods of syndication. While originally many institutions experimented with data publishing using the OAI-PMH protocol, and later SPARQL endpoints, Rest API’s and now Linked Data API’s are becoming more standard, see e.g. the Data portal of Rijksmuseum.

Another good example is what happens in the Europeana portal, where metadata content from a large number of European Heritage institutions is gathered through an aggregation process. Once such data are published in a linked data framework, they can serve as a source for automatic enrichment of catalogue data, e.g. through reconciliation, e.g. with the popular tool OpenRefine. There it can be merged with data from e.g. Wikipedia or online thesauri such as Getty.

When we started with CS Digital (now DigitGLAM) with digital storytelling for Europeana collections, at first the Europea tool was not integrated with the Europeana database and used a separate CMS to publish the stories; Now this integration is a fact and one can build stories directly based on the aggregated collection data. Some examples of a series started about 10 years ago by Sofie Taes, who was our main digital writer for Photoconsortium, can be found here:

• Industrial Photography in the Machine Age
• An Eye for Detail
• Power to the People
• People on the Move
• China in Perspective
• Blue Skies Red Panic
• A Century of technology
• Family Matters

Tapping on the power of current AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, it becomes even more easy to integrate data from different sources to enrich metadata as well as generate digital stories. The main advantage of working on aggregated content is that you can enrich the content substantially with relatively low effort.

The next step is to make sure that the digital stories are also integrated in the database architecture and the cross-reference information between various elements is stored in a replicable way. A very good technology to do so is by using IIIF to publish the information. Read more on IIIF on the Europeana Pro website Digital storytelling can integrate a variety of media, including 3D, and generate virtual mini-exhibitions across collections and institutions. this way, the heritage preserved in collections becomes a living part of our current environment, woven within the eternal “present” of the web.