Tag Archives: Strategy

Strategy across cultural heritage, communications, digital practice, institutions, and public engagement: aligning goals, audiences, systems, resources, and outcomes.

Digital Heritage Pros Share Top Tips for Developing Strategy

Digital strategy starts less with choosing technology than with getting clear about purpose, audiences, evidence, and actual institutional needs. Drawing on advice from practitioners across the cultural sector, this piece considers visual storytelling, CRM, testing, platforms, content, and the difference between what organizations want and what their audiences need. Together, the contributions make a larger argument: strategy is the discipline of connecting technology decisions to meaningful outcomes rather than accumulating disconnected digital projects.

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Developing a Community of Digital History Makers with a GLAM Cyber Café

The GLAM Café model was designed to give museum, library, archive, and heritage practitioners a regular place to experiment, learn, and build relationships around digital work. Drawing on models such as Wiki Salons, THATCamp, Code for America, and local maker communities, this toolkit explains how to create a low-barrier peer gathering where knowledge moves horizontally. The larger goal is not another conference, but an ongoing community capable of learning and making together.

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Yours Truly: An Interactive Archives Project

Yours Truly transformed thousands of pieces of Vizcaya correspondence into an interactive storytelling experience built around human-centered design. Rather than simply digitizing archival material, the project asked visitors to explore James Deering’s personality and choices through letters, multimedia, QR-triggered interpretation, and a responsive content system. The result connected archival access, visitor experience, infrastructure, and storytelling in a single platform that also created a foundation for future digital interpretation at Vizcaya.

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Information Technology: The less-fun, crucially important foundation of digital heritage evolution

Taking responsibility for IT initially felt like a detour from digital strategy and audience engagement. Instead, rebuilding the institution’s infrastructure revealed how deeply creative digital work depends on networks, servers, wireless access, policies, cybersecurity, and systems an organization can actually control. The experience reframed IT from a back-office necessity into strategic capacity: the less-visible foundation that determines whether ambitious digital interpretation can scale, adapt, and survive real institutional conditions.

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The Strategic Linchpin: Transforming Digital Tools into an Interpretive Platform

A strategic linchpin is a technology or approach that solves several institutional problems at once and becomes a platform for further work. Drawing on examples including the Preservation Technology Podcast and later digital initiatives, this piece argues for experimentation followed by concentration: test broadly, learn what creates value, then invest more deeply in the approaches that connect audiences, staff, content, and organizational goals. Strategy emerges when isolated tools begin functioning as parts of a larger system.

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