Ipswich Museum Lottery Fund for Technology

Ipswich Museum to improve visitor experience using advanced digital technology.

09:54 17 February 2019

Ipswich Museum, which has been recently awarded £461,600 of Heritage Lottery Fund, is exploring a greater use of technology to improve visitor experience.

 

Ipswich Museum manager James Steward said: “It’s as much about digital innovation,”

 

“With the redevelopment how that will be for the future will be important.

 

“We are looking at augmented reality, apps, and how people use the museum.

 

“People are coming with more up to date information than they were traditionally and we need to recognise that as part of the visitor experience.

 

“What we don’t want is for that to be a replacement for the visitors – there is no replacement for experiencing that collection first hand.”

 

The museum has been working on archiving its various materials to produce digital resources that can be used in any future apps or virtual reality (VR) technology. In October last year, it museum inventoried 3,500 items in the bonery and documented 1,400 social history artefacts. In addition, 700 archaeology objects have been photographed and 500 works have been digitised.

 

Izzy Keith, who has been overseeing the collections care, said: “It’s going to allow us to make it much better and more accessible.

 

“We can facilitate more research requests, we will be looking at the strategy as a whole and use all this to engage with our audiences online.

 

“We don’t have a basic search online interface and we will be looking to introduce that and more interactive works too.”