Page 227 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

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export painting. 23 The six steps in the valuation interest”, it is important that existing and future
process, given by the Dutch Cultural Heritage online-collection interfaces are optimally
Agency of the Ministry of Education, Culture designed. 25 I think that more than the
and Science, are disinterest of the audiences the poor user
experiences discourage people to use digital
1. Formulate the motive and the question possibilities to find images.
behind the valuation and record them on the A multi-layered Chinese export painting
valuation form. website in the Netherlands with a presentation
2. Decide what you are going to value, what of all inventoried paintings could not adopt a
reference framework you will use and who the representational approach that focused solely on
226 stakeholders are. Use the reference framework image content. Naturally, such a digital tool is
form as a guide if necessary. intended to be more than just an online image
3. Decide the relevant criteria for the valuation library. As many markings of references as
and define the valuation framework – record possible concerning the paintings must be
them on the valuation form. included. This means that, besides technical
4. Assign value scores and support them with features and physically marked numbers or
arguments – record this on the valuation form captions on the paintings themselves, informa-
5. Processing the assessment. tion about their total trajectory from production
6. Decision or action. 24 to consumption should also be presented on
such a website. This brings us back to the
This tool is designed to make the problematic apparently effective tools for disentangling these
concept of ‘value’ manageable for collection commodities: a cultural biography, translation
managers and decision makers, so that they can of content and materiality, and examination of
decide about next future steps in the cultural multiple ‘sites’ and ‘modalities’, including
biography of the painting collections involved in documentary sources on the various genres.
this study. This future might well be digital, in By embracing digital technology, such an
the form of databases, websites, and online initiative includes improving access to the now
exhibitions, or through the use of social media; overlooked museum items. In addition to this
they will not replace the physical museum object benefit, this will certainly enhance the profile of
though. The necessary informative aspects individual institutions, “beyond their physical
embedded in an original painting (feel and look, parameters, sharing the knowledge contained
technical features and evidence of use) must not within them as far afield as possible and
be overlooked. On the contrary, getting access to fostering collaboration with specific audiences.” 26
a physical museum object is fundamental to its According to Gerhard Jan Nauta, an art
analysis. Although, Craig MacDonald in historian specialised in visual knowledge and
‘Assessing the user experience (UX) of online humanities computing, large-scale digitisation is
museum collections: Perspectives from design taking place in the Netherlands by museums and
and museum professionals’ states that “studies archives, but this does not mean than it will
show that online museum collections are among serve the public on a similar scale. He states that
the least popular features of a museum website,
which many museums attribute to a lack of more than half of the digital collections in 2013

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23 See: http://cultureelerfgoed.nl/sites/default/files/publications/assessing-museum-collections_0.pdf
(consulted July 2016). Concerning the methodology to valuate a collection, the criteria are classified into four main
groups: “One relates to formal features, such as provenance, condition and rarity or representativeness. This leads
to a description, but not yet a valuation. The other three groups of criteria relate to three value domains: culture
historical, social and use value. Although these three groups are in principle of equal value, users may impose their
own hierarchy if they so wish. In order to be considered part of cultural heritage, an item or collection must satisfy
at least one ‘culture historical’ criterion.” (http://cultureelerfgoed.nl/publicaties/assessing-museum-collections).
24 http://cultureelerfgoed.nl/sites/default/files/publications/assessing-museum-collections_0.pdf, Content
(consulted July 2016).
25 MacDonald 2015.
26 I am much inspired by the words of Clare Harris, when she reflected on The Tibet Album website project at the
conference ‘The Future of Ethnographic Museums’, at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, in July 2013
(http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/PRMconference_lectures.html). In her paper ‘The digitally distributed museum and its
discontents’ she examined whether the digitally distributed museum will always meet with the desired response
from its users (consulted March 2016).