Digital exhibition for a museum: what you need before you start

A digital exhibition is not “the museum website with more photos”. It is a curated narrative built from the collection’s objects, it stays online for years, and it is often funded by a programme with specific deliverables. From our experience delivering digital exhibitions for the Onassis Foundation and collection platforms for museums and galleries across Greece, these are the five things that decide whether the project goes well.

1. The content exists before the code

The most common cause of delay is not technology, it is material. Before commissioning, make sure you have:

• An object list with title, creator, date, dimensions, material and inventory number. A spreadsheet is enough.
• Digitised images at adequate resolution. For artworks, at least 3000 pixels on the long side. For deep zoom, much more.
• Curatorial texts: introduction, sections, captions. If the exhibition is bilingual, the translations too.

If any of this is missing, we ask for it as a separate phase or include it in the project. The worst case is discovering it halfway through development.

2. Rights are clear

Every image, video and text to be published needs a clear rights status: owned by the institution, licensed from the creator or heirs, or public domain. For objects that will be offered to aggregators such as Europeana, a per-object licence statement (for example Creative Commons) is also required. This is decided by the institution, not the contractor, but the platform must be able to record it.

3. Standards-based metadata, not free text

An exhibition that is “just pages” cannot be reused. When objects are catalogued in a repository with structured metadata (Dublin Core, LIDO or the institution’s own schema), the same record feeds the exhibition, the timeline, the personality profiles and OAI-PMH harvesting by national and European aggregators. Content is entered once.

This is why our digital exhibitions start from a structured collection catalogue and build the narrative on top of it.

4. Who maintains it afterwards

A digital exhibition lives for five or ten years. Ask the contractor:

• Where is it hosted and who pays for hosting after the project ends?
• Who applies security updates and takes backups?
• Can museum staff add a new exhibition without a developer?
• If the contractor disappears, do we get the code and the data?

The answers belong in writing, in the contract.

5. What to ask for in the tender

For institutions tendering a digital exhibition, the deliverables we see working are:

1. A technical specification and approved interface designs before development.
2. An administration interface for curators, with bilingual content.
3. A repository with a public viewer, an API and an OAI-PMH endpoint.
4. WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility and responsive design.
5. Documentation, staff training and source-code handover.
6. A maintenance agreement with a defined response time.

If you are planning a digital exhibition or want to see how the platforms work for existing institutions, talk to us. We can show you live deployments and help you write the specification.