Retold Stories - Sustaining Cultural Memories in Open-Air Museums

When museum colleagues retire, all their knowledge disappears - how can we keep telling the stories of the generations before us to the public? The archives about the working lives of museums are interesting and important to preseve. We intend to develop a workflow for the museums to collect, digitize and publish their data in a structured, open access way. Our aim is seeting up a strategy other open-air museums can follow once the project is finished.
This is an excellent way for historical and archaeological open-air museums to cooperate and leads to strengthening to research and interpretaion framework of of open-air museums, adding to their sustainability.
A lot of information is present in the museums. The information includes all stories and information , video, photos, archive pieces we can find. We need to structure these data, then making it available. Possibly, the museum houses are a starting point from which one can zoom in and out.
The digitising is only a tool in the process. It is about knowledge transfer to a new generation of professionals and to the public.
The documentation has three purposes:
1- Comparable data leads to better resarch
2- Preserve tacit knowledge for the future
3. Use portions of fata for storytelling to the public
We mean to make information available to different groups:
- Own staff (deep level)
- Other colleagues (medium level)
- Public: offline as well as digital in the museums, and also online, shared on different plataforms.
It should not just be top down, but also bottom up: all users should be able to include their own stories and digital material. Other museums should be able to adopt our approach (so all should be open access). The most important will be internal and external knowledge transfer.