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virtual technologies is intimately connected to the lack of cultural infrastructure in his native Nigeria. “There are not the museum spaces of any size that can mount the kind of installations that I produce and so, in many ways, there are a lot of students back home who are not familiar with my work because not everyone can travel to experience them,” he said. Reflecting on her experience at both the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in her current role, Ms Jongma reflected on the tension between accessibility and authenticity in museums, a debate made all the more topical by the challenges posed by digital media. “In my opinion, authenticity is often used as an excuse not to do anything. If you have the original artefact in a museum, it’s usually used to force people to come and see it,” she said. “But then it’s exhibited completely out of context and there’s a line that means you cannot come close to the work of art.” For Ms Jongma, digital technologies have the potential to liberate objects that are normally inaccessible and to show a museum’s collection to the world. “The Rijksmuseum has 1.2 million objects, but there are only 6,000 on display. We can talk all about authenticity and experience but, for most objects, the experience is of laying in a box in a storage facility and that’s where they are stuck.” Rather than discouraging museum visitors, Ms Jongma’s experience has shown that digitising collections actually increases visitor numbers. “By putting your collection online you are actually promoting who you are. You’re showing the world what you’ve got. When the Rijksmuseum reopened \[after a 10-year closure\], it doubled its visitor numbers,” she said. Since leaving the Rijksmuseum, she now works in a totally virtual space, digitising objects related to the Second World War in the Netherlands, from more than 500 organisations worldwide. “If you’re interested in what happened to your family, you normally have 33