Keeping it real Museums and technology in the digital era

The increasing usage of digital technologies evokes a profound identity crisis for the museum institution and, importantly, for the people who devote their professional lives to the museum and its collection. Both on an institutional and a personal level, the digital transformation poses a fundamental question: what does it mean to ‘keep it real’ in the face of technological change? This dissertation combines a critical discourse analysis of political and professional efforts to make sense of this question with qualitative interviews of museum employees.
The Natur und Mensch in Oldenburg (Germany) and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden (Netherlands) serve as case studies to dive into the complexities of technology perception in museums. Over a period of two years, the dissertation accompanied the two museums in a time of accelerated technological innovation due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of this analysis show that a deficient understanding of the digital transformation as a finite process among policy-makers and museum practitioners leads to a lack of commitment to technology as an essential element of museum work. It also relegates the digital object to an existence of servitude and frames it as a competition to the authentic original. The reactions to the pandemic not only emerge as a litmus test for the state of digitalisation of an individual museum. It also functions as an analytical tool to understand the institutional and personal struggle with the idea of change in museums in more general terms.