DigMus : Empowering Museum Professionals with Digital Skills: Mapping Report

During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies provided vital tools for keeping museum audiences engaged and connected. In response to the crisis, many museums were forced to rapidly increase their digital presence. This, in turn, has affected and transformed daily museum operations and professional practices. In the aftermath of lockdown, it became evident that museum professionals urgently require new transferrable skills and competencies to comply with the new reality. The digital technology is already a crucial part of daily museum operations, but there is a shortage of digital skills and competences among museum personnel. To reveal and address them, there was a need to conduct mapping research into ongoing practices from practitioners’ perspectives. For this purpose, the DigMus team developed and distributed a survey to museums in Sweden, Estonia and Lithuania. The survey consisted of three sections that cover background information about the respondents and institutions, insight into professional practices, and recommendations for prospective training. With this survey, we do not aim to evaluate the performance and ability of different museum professionals to carry out specific digital activities. Rather, we try to generate a better understanding of the existing shortage in digital skills and competencies in order to tackle them by providing tailor-made professional training in the second stage of the project. Our approach to the survey involved gathering data from several individuals within each institution rather than auditing each museum via a single representative. The survey was disseminated by coordinating institutions, specifically by the Gävleborg County Museum in Sweden, the National Heritage Board in Estonia, and the Lithuanian Museums’ Centre for Information, Digitisation and LIMIS. The study was conducted from March through May 2021. In total, 96 respondents from 29 museums across the three countries participated. Given the intrinsically expl