Museum Collections Are Digitized, So Why Can't Anyone Find Anything?

Museum Collections Are Digitized, So Why Can't Anyone Find Anything?

Cultural heritage collections have never been more accessible. Digitized records. Public interfaces. Decades of metadata work.

And researchers, students, and curious members of the public still leave without finding what they came for.

This video is about why that happens - and why the problem is invisible to the institutions it affects most.

This is the first video in a series on LinkedCulture, a prototype built on open-source infrastructure across eight cultural heritage institutions and more than two hundred thousand records. The series covers the architecture, the observations, and what it means for how institutions think about discovery infrastructure.

The research behind this series is documented in several papers: Paper 1: Discovery architecture for cultural heritage: layered retrieval, institutional authority, and the limits of keyword search https://linkedculture.org/research/discovery-architecture-for-cultural-heritage

Paper 2: Discovery architecture for cultural heritage: layered retrieval, institutional authority, and the limits of keyword search https://linkedculture.org/research/embedding-cultural-heritage-metadata

Paper 3: Semantic Clusters and Language Partitioning in a Multi-Institutional Cultural Heritage Index https://linkedculture.org/research/semantic-clusters-language-partitioning

Learn more about LinkedCulture and the work behind it: https://linkedculture.org/

Heads up: This is an AI avatar of a real person, Edward Monk, in his own words and image.

Check out the podcast: Crossings: "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" with my crew on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eu-iU87X