The Digital Museum

Museums of yesteryear were often large, gloomy places, barely accessible to people with limited mobility, with information about exhibits written in small print only legible to those with excellent eyesight. In the late 20^th century, the development of small personal tape recorders meant that visitors could listen to information as they walked around, but they still needed to be present in the museum. The COVID-19 pandemic put a temporary halt to travel and provided the impetus for rapid uptake of digital technologies to create virtual museums which people could visit without leaving their own homes. The digital museum had arrived.

Curators and funding bodies across the world started turning to digital technologies in the 21^st century as a means of increasing the accessibility and broadening the appeal of traditional museums. Given the costs of preserving and maintaining displays and artefacts, the virtual environment also offers perhaps the only way of conserving physical cultural heritage for future generations. This is particularly important for the conservation of artefacts related to stigmatized aspects of heritage, such as mental illness. In Australia, there are few, if any, physical museums devoted to the history of asylums and psychiatric health care, while many former asylums have been demolished or repurposed. These are some of the reasons why we are attempting to create an accessible, virtual museum as part of our study of the history of the former Beechworth asylum.

It is our dream to track down as many items as possible with clear connection to Mayday Hills and to photograph them using state-of-the-art, three-dimensional digital cameras. These images will then be carefully curated into a virtual museum on our Mayday Hills website, along with informative descriptions and links to other parts of the website. To assist us with this we have received a grant from the Telematics Trust.