Pilot action on virtual exhibitions in Finland

In the BaMuR project, Forum Marinum is working to find tools to improve museums’ digital resilience, and in our pilot we are looking at virtual exhibitions as one part of the solution. In early January 2024, we invited representatives of different stakeholder NGOs to take part in a workshop on virtual exhibitions.

In the workshop, we took a close look at the different kinds of virtual and digital content that has been made available so far by Forum Marinum, collected comments and feedback from our stakeholders, and then discussed the issues that had come up over coffee and sweetrolls.

The content discussed included four virtual exhibitions on the Finnish Digimuseo.fi platform, about the museum ships Suomen Joutsen, Sigyn, and Bore, and the History of Finnish Underwater Warfare exhibition. It also contained the Finnish Coastal Artillery Museum website, and then a VR experience created together with the A1 Media company, available with a VR headset in the museum’s physical exhibition (as well as online).

The stakeholders taking part in the workshop represented Finnish NGOs and our own museum volunteers, including six different coastal artillery and navy heritage associations and a shipbuilding industry heritage association. Earlier on in the project, we have reached out to for example university students and school groups for opinions and feedback, along with a general questionnaire for our museum visitor. By involving heritage associations that often include retired professionals and active seniors, our goal was to broaden the scope of the groups reached in the pilot in terms of both different age and interests.  

The results of the workshop were quite encouraging for the project. We received very useful feedback on different facets of virtual exhibitions and digital content in museum use. This included commentary on practically using such services, from the point of view of improving accessibility and ease of use for people with varying levels of digital competences. We discussed, for example, what types of media would be best suited for virtual exhibitions, and what kind of a role gamified experiences could play in them. There was also discussion on the wider implications of the sustainability of digital services in museums, both in terms of everyday challenges like choosing dependable platforms and partners, and problems connected to sudden crisis situations of different severity.

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