If your museum has brought its collections online—or is planning to—you’ve likely grappled with a critical question. What’s the best way to bridge the gap between your physical collections and the digital world to increase visibility, access, and engagement?

Many institutions steward historically, culturally, and societally significant collections that are hidden in storage, away from public view.

But collections engagement solutions can help you bridge the physical-digital divide, offering innovative ways to showcase your objects, digital assets, and archival materials online.

These tools can also support crucial parts of your mission—like making your collections accessible for diverse audiences.

Taking the digital route offers huge potential for GLAM institutions that want to share their holdings with the world. Let’s explore why online collections matter and how emerging technology can bring your hidden collections into the light.

Unseen collections: Addressing the visibility gap

We all know that what museum visitors can’t see, they can’t engage with.

According to a recent International Council of Museums (ICOM) survey, most institutions only display 15% of their total collections to the public. This visibility gap stems from two main obstacles: limited gallery space and staffing constraints that force institutions to keep their holdings in storage.

The survey revealed that larger institutions were most impacted due to the sheer size of their collections. Some museums steward millions of objects, which are impossible to physically showcase all at once.

Smaller institutions tend to hold smaller collections, and as a result, can display a greater percentage of them. However, they face their own challenges, particularly when overseeing archives that are difficult to digitize due to a lack of funding, personnel, or both.

These hurdles aren’t limited to museums. Many institutions stewarding collections—like archives, libraries, universities, community nonprofits, and research centres—also struggle with similar barriers to access, visibility, preservation, and outreach.

Do online collections still matter?

Bringing collections online surged in popularity when 90% of the world’s museums closed to visitors during COVID-19. But digital collections are far from a pandemic era relic.

More than ever, museums and heritage institutions serve as vital sources of truth in their communities. Online collections can provide access to diverse histories and knowledge that may not be readily available elsewhere.

And the public is interested in seeing your unseen collections. A University of Glasgow survey revealed that 79% of respondents want to use digital technology to explore museum collections that aren’t accessible to the public.

Embracing newer technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, 3D modelling, and the International Image Operability Framework (IIIF) can also help museums stay engaging and relevant in the digital age.

How can online collections benefit your institution?

With the right technology partner, bringing your collections online is often simpler than you might expect—and the ROI makes it well worth the effort.

Here’s how online collections can help your institution reach more people, share stories in new ways, and cater to today’s digital-first audiences.

Boost the visibility of your museum or GLAM institution

Expand your institution’s reach across the world. Beyond local residents or visitors, collections online can be shared with anyone who has an internet connection.

By offering online collections, you can:

• Grow organic traffic: Spend less of your marketing budget on paid ads. According to a One Further report, online collections drive about 20% of website traffic for institutions. (Displaying a visual art collection? That figure rises to 32%!) 75% of this traffic comes from organic search, with more than 20% arriving through image search alone.
  
  

• Reach greater audiences: Cross-promote related collections or exhibitions in partnership with other heritage institutions to show web visitors how different collections intersect and increase their knowledge.
  
  

• Streamline social media engagement: Share links to your online collections on your social media accounts to catch people’s attention, build engagement, and increase followers.
  
  

• Encourage in-person visits: Experiencing your collections online can pique your web visitors’ curiosity about what they could see at your institution, prompting more in-person visits.

Increase access to your collections and archives

Not everyone can access physical collections. Online collections give visitors who are unable to interact with your exhibitions in person an opportunity to engage in a way that works for them.

Bringing collections online help diverse groups explore your holdings by:

• Improving access: Allow 24/7 collections access for people with mobility limitations, those geographically distant from your location, and others who face barriers to access.
  
  

• Keeping collections available: Empower people to access your collections regardless of what happens on-site—like renovations, moving buildings, unforeseen events, or emergencies.
  
  

• Reduce crowding and discomfort: Enable thousands of people to see the same object at the same time, without the physical limitations of gallery space. You’ll also make exploration less stressful for people who are uncomfortable visiting in person.
  
  

• Supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA): Help underserved communities see your collections for free by removing barriers like admission costs and transportation fees that may traditionally exclude them.

Increased access also benefits scholarship and the advancement of knowledge. When researchers can access your collections, they can build on their understanding, contribute new insights to their fields, and share what they learn with the world.

Act as an educational and research hub

Imagine how exciting it is for academic audiences to find the information they need in a user-friendly central hub. Online collections allow museums to provide:

• Expanded access: Researchers, scholars, and students are no longer limited to visiting institutions in their area—or those they can afford to travel to. It’s now possible to view and study collections from around the globe.
  
  

• Deeper exploration: Space is limited for on-site exhibitions. Online, the possibilities are limitless. Collections objects and archives can be shared with more detail than would fit into museum labels, and different objects can also be linked together to show relationships.
  
  

• Flexible education: Give visitors an opportunity to complete self-directed learning at a pace that works for them, or wander through collections with their curiosity as their guide. Audio recordings can also be added to online collections records for an extra layer of context and learning.

Take Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium’s Animal Encyclopedia as an example.

Available on their redesigned website, this educational resource features 350+ records, each with a high-res image and details on a particular marine animal. It updates automatically via a Terentia API that connects Mote’s digital asset management system to their site.

As an educational and research hub: educators can use it to design curricula or lesson plans, students for assignments or exploration, and researchers to inform their work.

Create new storytelling opportunities

Your institution’s exhibitions tell compelling stories through physical space—and online collections open up a whole new world of storytelling.

With them, you can create immersive narratives that:

• Bring objects to life: Support thematic curation and build dynamic, engaging stories by connecting multimedia, oral histories, and community narratives.
  
  

• Go beyond physical constraints: Experiment with virtual collections and interpretive formats that aren’t limited by gallery walls. Online collections can, for instance, include a much higher volume of digital assets or allow visitors to interact with audio and video in a quiet environment.

Champion long-term digital preservation initiatives

Contribute to your long-term digital preservation strategy by digitizing and publishing your collections to ensure their accessibility and usability over time.

Online collections can support preservation by:

• Preventing loss: Publishing your digitized collections can be part of your institution’s larger digital preservation strategy, meant to protect objects, archives, and records from risk factors like environmental damage and obsolescence.
  
  

• Enhancing interpretation: Using new storytelling outputs in your online collections helps audiences engage more deeply. Over time, this approach enriches how these items are understood and interpreted, and subsequently enhances the digital curation lifecycle.

Beyond building engagement, online collections help amplify and preserve the context surrounding your holdings.

Beyond online collections: New ways of reaching web audiences

Online collections provide a powerful foundation for reaching web audiences—but they’re just the starting point. Incorporating new technologies can encourage the public to engage in new ways and create more memorable experiences.

Multimedia-driven storytelling

Connect with your audiences by using multimedia to tell stories that resonate. Unlike in-person exhibitions—where too much audio or video can cause sensory overload—digital collections support all the formats you’d like.

Including multimedia in your online collections lets you:

• Create immersive experiences: Build stories that move people by incorporating video interviews, audio narratives, 3D digitization, and interactive elements into your online collections.
  
  

• Invite community contributions: When suitable, invite audiences to contribute their own stories and perspectives on collections items. You could also ask them to share what they’d like to see featured in your collections through an online suggestion form.
  
  

• Feature curator insights: Highlight your curators’ expertise by sharing their insights and behind-the-scenes content. The curation team can share their passion and the public can get unique experiences that physical museums may not offer.

Interactive timelines and maps

Incorporate interactive timelines and maps into online collections to help users visualize how collections objects connect to history through space and time.

These tools can make your storytelling more memorable and help staff:

• Reveal context and connections: Plot collections items chronologically on interactive timelines to reveal historical patterns and relationships that may otherwise be missed.
  
  

• Showcase collections’ origins and movements: Use geospatial mapping to create custom maps related to your collections objects. This increases users’ understanding of where objects came from and how they’ve moved over time.
  
  

• Create thematic journeys: Engage audiences in new ways by using virtual tours to guide them across time periods, societal events, or artistic movements. This additional context helps to paint a more holistic picture.

Wondering how this interactivity might work in practice? #DearCoretta, an online timeline on The King Center’s website, exemplifies this approach.

Part of a multi-year initiative between The King Center, Microsoft, and Terentia, this timeline brings to life Mrs. Coretta Scott King’s impact and legacy through a powerful collection of photos, portraits, newspaper articles, and videos.

QR codes

Not enough space to display all the information you’d like in an on-site exhibition? Want to connect users to online collections from physical locations? QR codes are a great solution.

By scanning these square barcodes with their smartphones, people can travel straight to your online content. No need to type out long URLs or use a search engine.

Here’s where QR codes can help you bridge the physical-digital divide:

• In exhibitions: Place them beside physical collections objects to link to expanded content, such as a landing page that offers visitors more information or interactive features like a timeline or audiovisual materials.
  
  

• On printed materials: Direct visitors to specific collection highlights or thematic groupings. If you offer a visitor brochure with information on your museum’s services and exhibitions, adding a QR code can pique interest in your digital collections.
  
  

• Interactive experiences: Connect physical objects with digital resources to help users form deeper connections with history and heritage. For example, you could set up QR code-based scavenger hunts or guided experiences.

The Beck Cultural Exchange Center’s Beck Cultural Corridor uses QR codes to help visitors expand their knowledge and engage with history in new ways. It’s an interactive excursion in East Knoxville showcasing the rich legacies of African Americans in the region.

As people journey through, they can scan QR codes placed at different locations. The codes connect with Beck’s online collections that host audio clips, oral histories, and historical photos.

International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)

Want to support rich image functionality, facilitate collaboration, and maintain proper attribution? The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) can help.

IIIF is a set of standards that helps ensure online images are high-quality, appropriately credited, and work well across different online systems.

Together, these standards offer museums and heritage institutions with digital collections a way to:

• Maintain image quality: Enable high-resolution image viewing with deep zoom capabilities, so users can examine objects in minute detail. This delivers the rich detail that scholars and researchers need for accurate interpretation.
  
  

• Compare different objects: View objects from different collections side-by-side to facilitate precise comparisons. Understand connections between different collections and improve contextual understanding.
  
  

• Facilitate collaboration: Empower people across the world to collaborate on their research. Collaborators can leave comments for each other on images and audiovisual materials, which is much more efficient than handling ideas and feedback in a separate document.
  
  

• Ensure proper usage: Make it easier to share images while maintaining proper attribution. IIIF allows you to include rights, licensing, and usage information alongside each image.

AI-powered discovery

Help web visitors find what they’re looking for—or discover unexpected treasures—with powerful AI solutions.

Artificial intelligence can make exploration easier and more engaging by:

• Making recommendations: Engage visitors by letting AI suggest related items based on their viewing history or interests. For example, if someone explores Indigenous history images in your online collections, AI could recommend oral histories from Indigenous peoples.
  
  

• Revealing hidden connections: Redesign in-person exhibitions, or the structure of your online collections, in innovative ways with machine learning (ML) insights. ML can illuminate connections between objects that may not be immediately apparent.
  
  

• Enabling searching for similar items: Help visitors search for visually similar objects across your collections with AI-powered image recognition.These tools can delight your visitors by showing them digital assets they may not have expected—and wouldn’t have thought to look for using your search bar.
  
  

• Helping users explore collections: Let visitors explore through conversational AI interfaces that use natural language queries. When users search in their own words, they can explore in creative ways and not feel frustrated with tools that don’t meet their needs (like generic chatbots).

Interested in harnessing the power of AI solutions, but worried about causing harm? Learn more about ensuring ethical and responsible AI use in museums.

Mobile-first experiences

With smartphone usage increasing, it’s essential for GLAM institutions to offer website experiences optimized for mobile devices. Mobile-first design improves the user experience by:

• Reducing frustration: Deliver an annoyance-free experience, so users don’t need to fight to interact with your online collections, or deal with resolution problems and poorly cropped content. Make sure to provide responsive interfaces that work seamlessly across all devices.
  
  

• Increased personalization: Engage visitors with location-aware smartphone apps that respond to their position within a certain space. For example, encourage your visitors to explore related collections to the exhibition they’re viewing, or prompt them to participate in games or quizzes.
  
  

• On-the-go engagement: Offer bite size-content formats that can be digested quickly, so cellphone users don’t have to spend excessive time scrolling. Think shorter paragraphs, skimmable text, and zoom functionality.

Mobile-first online collections can help your institution reach your audience wherever they are, using their preferred device.

Bring your collections online with Terentia

In sum, online collections play an evergreen role in empowering museums and cultural institutions to deliver greater access to their holdings, increase public visibility, and engage audiences in new ways.

By integrating fresh approaches and emerging technologies, you can finally move your collections out of storage and into the spotlight—bridging that once insurmountable gap between the physical and the digital.

In doing so, you can provide visitor-centric experiences that reinforce your institution’s mission to serve the public.

Collections Online, part of the fully integrated Terentia platform, can help you bring your collections to life via digital-first experiences. Book a demo with Terentia to see it in action and discuss the possibilities for transforming your institution’s collections engagement.