October 09, 2019

Key Takeaways from the 2019 Smithsonian Digitization Conference

Innovation is critical when it comes to transforming the workforce and developing new ways to engage with citizens. The Smithsonian Digitization Program Office hosted the 2019 Digitization Conference in October bringing together experts from the education, entertainment, and research communities, as well as technology leaders to explore how museums, archives, libraries, and cultural institutions can use digitized collections to expand citizen accessibility and engagement through creative technical solutions.

Key takeaways from our team:

 

  1. Smithsonian Operations and Maintenance (O&M): Goals and objectives include modernizing Operations to deliver a higher level of customer service and support the migration to the cloud. Projects include the implementation of an ITSM platform to automate operations and maintenance processes and migration of data and mission critical applications to the cloud.
  2. Digital Museum Experience: Creating a virtual museum experience is the long-term goal. Virtual reality and augmented reality are fairly new and immature resulting in the lack of standards to enable a mass distribution platform across the world. More time is required to allow the technologies to mature and standardize however, moving to the cloud is essential to enabling this goal.
  3. Data Preservation: Curators are focused on not only preserving the actual data, but also the metadata, intent, and story that coincides with the artifact. It’s a difficult goal, but all resolves around the data regardless if it is text, audio, or video.
  4. Large Cloud Data Migration: In order to fully support a Digital museum experience, all the archives must be scanned and moved to the cloud, secured and made available and shared across the community.
  5. Mobile App Engagements: The increased use of mobile apps will foster public interest in culture driving additional traffic to the museum. Digitally exposing the artifacts, their history and relevance to the world.

Understanding the impact of the 21st- century audiences, is one of the Smithsonian’s goal and collaborating with the right partner can help promote and increase the diffusion of knowledge for greater reach, relevance, and profound impact.

1901 Group brings technical expertise, standard ITIL processes, and accelerators to automate operations to help agencies become a more powerful force.

Contact John Feid, john.feid@1901group.com, Senior Business Development Executive of 1901 Group, for more information.

 

John Feid
Senior Business Development Executive

Expert in providing innovative cloud computing solutions supporting government customers in redefining their businesses to deliver improved citizen services.

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