Interdepartmental Approaches to Transforming Digital Workflow and Decision Making at the New-Yor…

Speakers: Rosanna Flouty, Pauline Noyes During this 30 minute session, we share how the New-York Historical Society took an interdepartmental approach to digital content management with the goal of deepening public engagement for education audiences online. Through a three-year grant, a core group of staff from the IT, Museum, Library, Exhibitions and Education departments received training on a variety of digital skills -- and shared out their training across the museum. Staff members brainstormed connections between one another's work to find ways to support online programming, digital content, and online collections. As an interdepartmental team, staff also worked collaboratively to ensure the institution’s digital collections, and the content management systems that organize them, are optimized for public accessibility and for use in education programming. This allowed us to connect our digital staff to the needs of our core audience, leading to increased culturally responsive museum content and, in line with our unique mission, more representation of non-dominant narratives of history for teachers and students. We will share our collaborative approach to transforming our museum’s digital workflow and decision making. Our experience has been that when staff from multiple departments learn aside one another, creative ideas from across disciplines can be produced organically, discussed immediately, and implemented sustainably. Together we will explore tactics that panelists (and the audience) have used to enable museum staff to fully understand, adopt and optimize digital technology in museums to further your mission.