Welcoming the world to the collections of the Ashmolean

An Van Camp is Curator of Northern European Art and Head of Digital Collections at the Ashmolean Museum. Here, she talks about her mission to share the Ashmolean’s collections online with new audiences both near and far, and the museum’s ambitious plans for the future.

The museum has a strong message: ‘Ashmolean for all’. We try to bring people who don’t feel confident about coming to museums through our doors. For me, sharing digital collections is a very inclusive way of achieving this.

I am very passionate about digitising our collections. It’s really important for advancing research, but equally so for the enjoyment of people both locally and across the world. We need to keep building on it, which is a very exciting prospect.

Some of the feedback we receive about our online collections is from people who want to locate an item that they know is held at the Ashmolean Museum, but isn’t online yet. So we know there is a real demand to see our collections online.

We would like to prioritise the digitisation of our Egyptian collection next. It’s world class and extensive with over 50,000 artefacts. A large part of it was excavated by the famous archaeologist Flinders Petrie and given to the museum via the Egypt Exploration Fund. An important part stems from the Predynastic Period, which dates from before the pharaohs, and is therefore of great interest. You can’t find this in any other museum in the world outside of Egypt.

For example, one online visitor was looking at our Albrecht Dürer prints and emailed me to say ‘Did you know that you have an impression of a really rare state? I’ve published a paper on it’ — so that was quite interesting!

Coins and prints — including printed bank notes — can tell you a lot about history and about society. They are so widely distributed and everyone uses them daily, rich or poor. They are very popular features on our website, but there are tens of thousands more coins and prints that we could add if we had the resource to do so.

In the future, we’d like to present our online collections more thematically and even create virtual exhibitions — such as items relating to writing, transport, or food and drink. If items have featured in an exhibition and we have done all the research, written the label texts and perhaps even created a catalogue, we might as well share our insights digitally.

Our goal is to have 25% of the collection online this year (2020). We have about 10% of our collection online, so the entire museum is working hard at the moment to achieve our goal. This is why we need more resources and why we have launched the annual appeal. Ultimately, we hope to have all the collections in one place and make them cross-searchable, across cultures and across time.

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