Ralf Bormann’s scientific contributions

Visiting a museum today is no longer to be thought of as analogue only, but also digital. The digital museum as part of digital literacy is now standard for good museum work and an important area of museum work even without a digital strategy. Online collections, in particular, have established themselves as important digital draught horses. These online collections com-bine various aspects of digital museum work. But their creation, maintenance and upkeep is complex and ties up many museum resources. We use the creation of the online collection of the Tiroler Landesmuseen to show the complexity of the creation process, the technical and historical background and then deal specifically with the Grafische Sammlung in order to demonstrate the detailed work that is necessary for such an online collection to function as a scientific and communicative flagship. The mass of data fields conceived for this purpose and presented here, and the ways in which they are filled, build a haystack around the work of art, not in order to hide the work of art in it like a needle, but rather to make it visible in the first place, namely to make it discover-able for the interested lay person as well as the specialist under manifold questions that we (and sometimes even the users) cannot foresee.