Museums and galleries faced extraordinary challenges in 2020. Short term fixes to keep in touch with audiences, make collections accessible, and re-open exhibitions required adaptations and innovations that will shape the long-term future of public heritage in the UK. A shift to digital ways of working was accelerated, for better and for worse.

In this online symposium we will take stock of how museums and galleries adapted during 2020 and where we go from here. How will the pandemic and its aftermath affect how we create new digital content for museums and galleries? How will it re-shape the relationship that museums and galleries have with their audiences? On the one hand, there are exciting opportunities to create digital experiences, within and outside museum walls, that allow different museum communities to emerge. On the other, digital technology creates new barriers to participation, potentially deepening existing inequality of access to museums and their collections.

The Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies brings you insights from two AHRC-funded University of Nottingham museum projects that had to significantly adapt the way they worked in 2020. Speakers from these projects will be joined by a museum experts to discuss how museums created new digital cultures during the pandemic, what the future now holds for digital culture in museums, and how museums and universities can work together to overcome the challenges we face.

Speakers include:

Andrea Hadley-Johnson (Artistic Programme Manager, National Justice Museum): ‘Letters of Constraint’

Brendan Cormier (Lead Curator, Shekou Design Museum Project, V&A), ‘Pandemic Objects’

James Mansell (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham), Annie Jamieson (Curator of Sound Technologies, National Science and Media Museum) and Alex De Little (Research Fellow, University of Nottingham), 'Sonic Futures: Collecting, Curating and Engaging with Sound at the National Science and Media Museum'

Louise Stafford (Director of Learning, National Holocaust Centre and Museum) and Paul Tennent (Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Nottingham), ‘The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust’

Gillian Greaves (Relationship Manager, Museums, Arts Council), title to follow

This event is open to all university researchers, museum professionals and interested individuals.