In this episode Ash chats to Michal Čudrnák Head of Digital Collections & Services at the Slovak National Gallery.
We talk about the history of the gallery, and how the Digital team has grown and evolved over recent years. We talk about the interesting and somewhat unique role that the Slovak National Gallery plays in supporting the wider Slovak cultural sector with digital tools and expertise. We look at the role of digital in supporting in-person attendance, and how designing for this context is very different from 'fully remote' experiences.
Michal explains of the different ways that his team works with other organisations, on collaborative projects with the cultural sector in Slovakia and further afield, and we explore some examples of public-private relationships that they are exploring.
You can see some of the work that Michal and his team have delivered:
In this episode Ash chats to Michal Čudrnák Head of Digital Collections & Services at the Slovak National Gallery.
We talk about the history of the gallery, and how the Digital team has grown and evolved over recent years. We talk about the interesting and somewhat unique role that the Slovak National Gallery plays in supporting the wider Slovak cultural sector with digital tools and expertise. We look at the role of digital in supporting in-person attendance, and how designing for this context is very different from 'fully remote' experiences.
Michal explains of the different ways that his team works with other organisations, on collaborative projects with the cultural sector in Slovakia and further afield, and we explore some examples of public-private relationships that they are exploring.
You can see some of the work that Michal and his team have delivered:
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode, which is episode 46, we have a conversation with Mikhal Chudanak, who is head of digital collections and services at the Slovak National Gallery. Mikhal and I had a really interesting conversation about building teams, the history of the Slovak National Gallery, the work his team have been focused on around experience, design, the consultancy work they do with cultural organisations as well as private companies, the way in which the Slovak National Gallery supports the broader Slovak cultural sector with tools and products, and loads more. Mikhal has taken a really interesting approach to the way that he's structured and led his team and I think there are some interesting lessons in there for lots of other cultural organisations. Enjoy, hi, mikhal. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat today.
Speaker 1:Hi, thank you for inviting me, so we'll talk in a moment about the Slovak National Gallery. We'll talk about your role at the Slovak National Gallery and the work of your team, but, as I always do with these conversations, I want to hear about your career, your journey. How did you get to where you are today? What does that journey look like?
Speaker 2:It's been quite a long journey, but not in the sense that I didn't work in this field before. I'm working at the Slovak National Gallery for quite some time. People are always shocked to hear that I'm working there almost 20 years and since I started. So more or less it's my first long-term job and I had a few other side jobs and other activities which preceded this one. But I came into this field by the studies of library and information science and from there on it wasn't actually such a long way to collection management system, because for those of you listeners who know about library information science, it traditionally deals with cataloging and with library systems for cataloging, which changed a little in recent years.
Speaker 2:But if you take this into the museum sector you arrive at the collection management system. So that was my kind of lineage and there was a few things in between which might also influenced me. In the sense I'm not a hardcore collection management person, although that's what I started with. But at the time I started to work at Slovak National Gallery I was also working at a NGO, at a few collectives which have been dealing with new media. We've been organizing discussions, talks and workshops dealing with new media, which was a thing at the time and it also kind of influences of what I'm doing with the team we have at the Slovak National Gallery, in the sense that we are not only cataloging but we are also creating new things and trying to approach museum experience in a different way than maybe others don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I absolutely want to talk about that work because I think the approach you've taken to building a team and then the focus of that team is really interesting and inspiring. But before we jump into that section of the conversation, I would like to hear a bit more about the Slovak National Gallery. What is SNG? What is the focus of the institution? And perhaps as well we've got people who listen to this in lots of different countries how is SNG funded?
Speaker 2:It's completely funded by the state. It's one of those state-funded organizations, those national top-level organizations that have the funding from the government, which is both good and bad, as it is always, and the history goes back to the time after the Second World War when the established or re-established Czechoslovak state was rebuilding the country after the war and of course, it had some continuation of the times before. So in the mid-war there was Czechoslovak Republic, which was quite different to the one which was founded after the Second World War, which was almost from the beginning a communist-led country. So specific to the SNG, compared to Czech National Gallery or even the Polish one or other European countries, is that we haven't got many top-level art from dating in history and being a continuation of some King's collections or some aristocratic collections, because when there was some kind of aristocratic families in Slovak towns it was mostly German ones or Jewish or Hungarian, which obviously wasn't the case after the war.
Speaker 2:Even though we have a few items of the old European masters, it's not anything that people would associate with the SNG, but what they can associate and what you can expect when you come to visit us is a really strong collection of mid-war modernist art and, of course, after war, which also means that we have a lot of not so great art that has been bought in the 70s, especially when there was the Soviet invasion of the Warsaw Pact, but in the time in between, especially in the 60s, when there was a thought like a lesser control of the ideology behind the art, and we also have quite a valued collection of Gothic art.
Speaker 2:So it's really strong in the focus on the local region, which has been culturally always quite diverse. As I mentioned, there's been a German-Hungarian, although you can't see much of it because a lot of this has been taken away in the 50s. And that's what also my colleagues working on the exhibitions are trying to leverage to make that what we have Interesting, not to try to have touring exhibitions of world-known art, which we don't have budget for anyway, but we really try to make it up by showing the people what is special. So we had really well-attended exhibitions on the art that has been created during the Second World War which is really strongly influenced by the Slovak fascist state. Then currently, if you come to visit us, we have one permanent exhibition focused on the art, formally from the church, with focus on Gothic art or Baroque art. So we are really working with what we have at home.
Speaker 1:It sounds like from what you've described there that the Slovak National Gallery is focused on having a very Slovakian focus and perspective and conversation around the stories that you're sharing and the object that you know, the art that you've got in your collection.
Speaker 2:That's correct. That's what really drives also the current ongoing reconstruction, because we've been closed for a long time. We have three buildings in Bratislava, which is one complex. So in the seventies we really had a big addition to the old historical buildings, which is old barracks from 17th century, and the well-known Slovak architect, vladimir Dedeče, has proposed a bridging connecting two wings of these barracks. So it's really a massive, so to say, brutalist addition to this building.
Speaker 2:But it's not been really well built at the time and it really quickly dated. So we had to close it at the end of the nineties or beginning of 2000. So it served only 30 years and only now, almost exactly one year ago, we've been able to reopen again with this new building. Before that we are functioning only in a tiny small space of one building of two floors with a few exhibitions per year. So with this new building our colleagues are really working along with us on how can we present this to people so that they don't feel that they are missing something international or something that they know, especially if they are international.
Speaker 1:And I think that brings us neatly on to the role of digital at SNG. If you had less physical space to play with to bring visitors into, I'm intrigued by how digital works for you and the focus of your digital activity at the SNG. Could you sort of summarize broadly how digital works for you, how digital works for the institution and the focus of that digital activity?
Speaker 2:If I again come come back to my focus, because it kind of builds up upon that, not that I would be the one who who started it. I also took up from my colleagues before me who've been building a collection management system for the network of all Slovak galleries, which is quite a unique thing, I think. It's a collection management system developed not in-house but developed with us as product donors to serve the whole network of galleries, because it's written down in the law that if you are a state registered gallery you are obliged to provide the data to us, and it happens that you are providing the collection data using the system we are giving you for free to the gallery because it's funded again by the government. So it all started with this collection management system Union Catalog and collection management system, both in one with colleagues before me, and it all extended from that on and with the name we are currently operating within the gallery. The name of the department is Digital Collections and Services. It's pointing to the fact that the core of the work we have been doing historically, but still work with this, is digital collection, meaning online collections, apps using the items from the collection and making them available to people, with the interactive onsite.
Speaker 2:Of course we are on the go broadening the scope of the products we are developing, but still at the core we keep the digital collections and as time went we kind of took up other sections of digital insights of the institution. For example, we lead the exhibition or the institutional website development product wise, not content wise, and we are currently working on interactive for the new exhibition spaces, for the new permanent exhibitions which I mentioned. But still, the digital is not a department where I'm working at, it's one of the departments. So we have quite a strong educational department which also works with us on these projects and they also use technology themselves. So it's not like we own it all. The same goes for the marketing department, which has its own focus on creating the content for the website, for making podcasts and video series.
Speaker 2:So we still naturally keep this, this organic distribution of digital within the organization, and I don't think it will lead to a point where it will be all taken up by one department, because it doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you've touched on two things there which are really the reasons I want to speak to you and we'll come to the first one in a minute and that is the role of SNG and specifically the digital focus of SNG for the wider Slovak sector. I think is really really interesting. But also, the way that you described that digital exists at the Slovak National Gallery sounds quite, you know, mature. The fact that digital is embedded in multiple departments, that it's to a degree decentralized. You know that you're collaborating with colleagues. It's not every Maybe I'm making assumption here, but it doesn't sound like everyone is coming to you and saying we need some digital help, we don't know what we're doing. Can you do it for us? It's more of a perhaps equal collaborative relationship between your team and other parts of the gallery. Would that be a fair description of how things exist?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it, although there could be a distinction where we would say that is our domain.
Speaker 2:And apart from those departments I mentioned, we have a really big department of digital technologies which deals with the digitization and with digital Hideware, mostly for the exhibitions.
Speaker 2:So we've been working on a digitization, large scale digitization projects few years ago, again funded Also by government, by mostly by you to digitize again not only Slovak national gallery collections but collections of all Slovak galleries participating in the network.
Speaker 2:So they also have their own projects running. And I'm going to mention an example which is not that exciting, but there was a need for a software to keep track of the hardware and of course that wasn't then anything that we would have to do, because if the department which is taking care of the hardware is the one who is the owner of the process, then they have enough capacity to select and lead the project of this small system to track the items themselves. The same goes for the marketing department with the videos. Of course we also did some, content ourselves with the collections, but, considering the gallery operations or the programming that they are in charge of, they are doing it on their own, because producing a video is not a question of skills in digital. It's question of Of content and of knowing the right people to do that which we don't even have to have employed which we partly do have, but we also ask other people to do it for us.
Speaker 1:I want to talk now about people and about the skills and the roles that you have employed as part of your team, because I think I'm right in saying that you do have an in house team of, you know, ux researchers, designers, developers that sit, I believe, in your team and that is. It's not a unique model. You know, you see that at some of the you know, the bigger museums in the UK, bigger museums and galleries in North America, but perhaps not that regularly. I'm interested to hear a bit about the background to that. You know, I don't know if it was your decision, but how was that decision made to build that team in house? Perhaps maybe some words of wisdom, words of encouragement for anyone else who's maybe thinking about doing this, about how you convince your colleagues and the institution as a whole to invest in building that team and then we'll talk a bit about benefits in a moment. But I'm intrigued to hear a bit about the background to how that collection of people came to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's story I'm telling usually which goes that we've been developing this online collection On top of the collection management system I mentioned with the external company which was the same one as the one developing the collection management system, and it kind of worked fine and quickly we realized that if we want to make it really really good, then the amount of time you need to invest goes beyond the budget you have for developing it within external companies. Not possible to make it in one take you update it, whatever if you don't have really big budget for that. So I came to my colleague or director of the unit where we are operating research and development at the time now it's collection care and I told her that if we want to make it really good then we need to make it in house. And at the time there was really a lot of examples in the museums around the US and Australia, for example, and maybe some UK, but mostly US and Australia which had a lab inside of the museum. So it was Powerhouse Museum was one of the examples, and others in US, and it seemed to be quite a good option for us to try that and we said, or my colleagues at the L, let's go ahead and do it, and I found a colleague of ours who is still working with us from that time, igor Rehabilin, who has been really instrumental in taking the technological ownership, the development of the online collections in house. So the lab S and G, which is a brand we used to call the team we are working at although it's not a department, it's a platform because it might encompass people who are also not employed and from that on we Orgenically grew to a few more developers, to UX researcher in the recent years, to content editors, which has been also one of our colleagues and really important in the way we went forward. And if it was only for the online collections, maybe it wouldn't grow a little more.
Speaker 2:But as we went on, we found out that we could apply this model to any other digital product we think is a core capacity we should be Building for. So one of the recent examples is the institutional website of Slovak National Gallery, although that's, of course, not completely in house, because with the team we have we focus, as I said, on digital collections or On-site interactives. But institutional website is not something you'd have to do yourself. You need to make the proper design, tested, evaluate and to define the technological stack that you are able to maintain, which we kind of do at the moment or we will be doing after we finish, with the external developers and there now that some people from other institutions think that we might help them to do something for their institution, because the size we are operating at as I mentioned, not only our gallery but also the network is bigger just because it's much bigger in number of employees, so we can afford really to have a capacity which we might provide to someone else.
Speaker 2:So we had a few other institutions, like the Czech National Gallery or the Moravian Gallery in Czech Republic, asking us to help them with setting up the online collection only for their institutions. So we took the code we maintain, developed for the online collections we are working on. By the way, it's called Web of Art, which is Web Umenia in Slovak, and I hope you can mention it in the show notes, so that people can visit and we adjusted the product for them to suit their needs.
Speaker 2:and then we also had other institutions, not only from the museum sector but from the field of architecture, history, from other fields, asking us to work on similar projects. So it builds on and it doesn't stop up to the point where we think how we could branch this quote unquote commercial arm into some other entity so that the in-house work for really the institution is visibly separated from the one which is serving some other institution, so that it could also possibly grow on its own with other, even commercial, organizations. So at the moment we are discussing how to set up a group or I really don't know the exact wording in English, but it's a commercial, non-commercial group of also public bodies but also commercial companies which has a line of objectives and they are able also to provide commercial services to other public institutions.
Speaker 1:And I think this is such a fascinating model that you know, not only have you built this team, which services SMG, you know, with core digital infrastructure deliverables, there is also, then, a wider benefit for the Slovak and Czech cultural sectors to be able to benefit from those products and the expertise. And then there's a third stream of work about you being able to work in the commercial sector for people who would pay for your expertise and for working with you and, you know, for people listening to this who are working in institutions or leading teams like yours. I think this is a really interesting set of questions and possibilities to consider. However, I'm sure it doesn't come. You know there must be challenges there, I would imagine, particularly around capacity. You know SMG Is asking you about something check. National Gallery is asking you about some product related thing. Architecture firm is wanting to do another project with you.
Speaker 2:how do you go about balancing those different pulls on your, on your team's attention, and time is a challenge that is definitely a challenge, although luckily, I haven't heard a Argument from inside that you are working For others on the expense of our own work, and we are trying to do it so that it's clear that some people who are not employed can work on projects which are not for the Slovak National Gallery, because it's subcontracting. Someone works, but, of course, using knowledge that we have gained over time from the field. So I think the most crucial point, which I haven't really solved yet, is to have enough people who coordinate as delivery, as a product, to subcontract these people and to maintain the relationship with them, to give them enough work so they don't work with other studios, because, of course, the amount of people on the market, also in Slovakia, and developers, designers, is not unlimited, so you really have to make any for to Grasp the capacities they have and to have an ongoing stream of projects that they can use to work with us and not with someone else. That's one issue. The second.
Speaker 2:The second is is that you can also solve it by having this product viewpoint of, for example, us working on online collections as a product that is set both in technical terms and in budget terms, as a thing which we might easily sell or provide someone else without having to invest into a really turnkey solution rather than a product which is adjusted to a certain level but still is the core thing we develop ourselves anyway. And this, this view, takes a lot of time, also from the technological viewpoint. So, talking of components, design components and components in the sense of development, how that is easily reusable, how all those branches of this core product could go astray and then not really feedback into the main branch, that is really something. But luckily I have really great colleagues all the developers, designers, content people who are able to reflect on that, and it originally goes in direction of being able to do that without becoming really a spin off which doesn't have much common with the institution and I mean this is maybe an unfair question because you work.
Speaker 1:You work in the slavecultural sector, but I'm going to ask you to have opinions about other countries cultural sectors. Does this feel like a uniquely slow back model or does this feel like something that could be replicated in other countries? You know, I can immediately see the benefits of this sort of approach being taken in the UK, in England, for example but I don't know if it's A unique mix of Slovakia's funding and you know it's like a smaller country in the UK and historical context, how much of it is uniquely Slovakian and how much of it is more widely borrowable.
Speaker 2:It's unique in the sense that it's it's historically influenced by by this centralized approach of those collection management issues.
Speaker 2:So I think you can guess that this centralized approach is something that we have taken or still kept from the time before 89, before the change of the regime.
Speaker 2:But in the end it turns out that it's quite positive one actually if you can maintain it without being alterative, if you can leverage it in the positive Sense. But I think if you look at the gav UK example of really at least from my perspective one of the best state run services for government services in digital, then you could easily imagine something similar in culture, although I have not really enough information to say whether that would be possible, because that also has some historical Lineage which means that gov to the UK is so great that even exporting the knowledge they have for example, in Slovakia we have the design state design manual for state institutions, kind of taken from the UK one. So I'm not really in the position to consider whether that would be possible. But if it's possible In the general digital services domain in the UK or elsewhere, I imagine it must be possible to do the same in culture, but depends how well all the stakeholders from the state can align on the same vision.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think that would potentially be a challenge. But the reality is, every cultural organization, whether they're a theater or a museum or a gallery or an opera company or an independent cinema they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, spending money on the same things and actually, at some level, there is going to be a financial saving that can be made by bringing some consistency to that approach and also a improvement of quality of the system. You know, rather than everyone going off and building their Slightly customized solution to the same problem ticketing, for example, crm, etc. It does feel like there is the opportunity at least to have a conversation about whether a more centralized approach might be beneficial, and I think yours is an interesting model to look to. I think you're right as well the govuk government digital service model is an interesting one to look to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a better way to approach this is to obviously go bottom up, because, especially in the central and east Europe, the bottom up is Most of the time better than the top down approach to where in force. Also technological approach. We have really one of the worst examples how digital has been for 30 years deployed in the governmental services. That has been Huge amount of money poured into the governmental services without really Enough value compared to the amount of money that has been, and our approach is not even a strategic one. It's not that management would decide let's go ahead and sell or that's really not the wording we are using to Provide the services. We are doing as a core business, as a core service to other institution.
Speaker 2:It is to the extent of the online collection, but to the ones I mentioned after, that, like institutions from other fields, is not been a decision, has been growing or get organically because there has been a demand for that and from there on also the collaboration or the work with other institution goes up. And would that be supported by the government? It is somehow because we have enough budget to pay people we are working with, but it's not against the decision. But I think it would be good to see where this kind of informal networks are growing, to fund these networks, rather than One instance of a system to one particular institution, of course, the getting system, such a huge thing which is, I think, impossible to take up to the state level, but something else which is more innovative, which builds up on those already existing systems, could be developed in this sense in a collaborative way. So I hope we will see more of that.
Speaker 1:Me too. I didn't put this on the list of questions and things I wanted to talk to you about, but I know that at SNG you have done away with QR codes and you have your own SNG solution to achieve the same thing, called Atlas, and I'm intrigued about how you arrived at this solution. Again, I'll put a link to this, but I think it's a really well number one. It's much more beautiful approach, thank you. Our codes. Number two it's much more playful, I think as well.
Speaker 1:Your approach to it has been very playful and engaging. It's not just a Mechanism, it's part of the experience, it seems, and it feels like a good example of the sort of thing that would and could only happen really If you have an in house team, because I'm not sure that you necessarily ever put together a brief and do a procurement thing and get an agency to change a do qr codes. That wouldn't necessarily be the best investment perhaps, but when you have an in house team, you can constantly be looking at all aspects of the experience and tweaking and testing and experimenting. It feels like atlas, would I Be right in saying is perhaps a good example of the benefits of having colleagues who are located in the museum who are? You know they understand all of the different parts of an experience and can try different approaches to different aspects of that.
Speaker 2:I would frame it as a luxury. We have to do this kind of thing because otherwise smaller museum or one which already has a digital guides, both provided by some company, wouldn't think of other ways of providing access to the collections or to the exhibited items Other than number codes that's one usual suspect or, as you mentioned, cure our codes. So we had this luxury of inventing or coming up with something else, and it was a answer, or like attempt of an answer, to a question of how might we add context for the visitors once the new building is open, while still using the collections we have in house, so that we don't have to pay for, like, integration of a API to the widely accessible digital guides. You can name your own. I won't be promoting any of these, but it is also one of the motivations that we own the online collections. We develop also the API of it on our own, so it's much easier to make this kind of thing sustainable in the long term, because exhibitions are changing and so on, so we can easily add new data, because it's not only about, like, those metadata, which not even most people are interested in too, of course, but it's mostly about the images, so we have higher resolution images of large parts of the collection, so we don't need to feed that into the system, we just take it from the image server we are running.
Speaker 2:And the reason why we decided to use this kind of playful code system, which you can imagine as a three grid of black or white circles and, as a visitor, when you see this kind of label with some circles in the great white, some black, then you just tap it into the grid to receive the artwork information instead of a QR code, because we did small exploration before and then also quite intensive testing and we found out that this is really works. It's, as you said, less invasive than a QR code, more legible than a QR code, because it has all these problems with transparency on on glass, on the visibility from a further distance, and you don't want people to come too close to the artworks and you can also see it from a further distance, not blocking the view to other people. And, as you said, also the playful aspect of just typing, tapping into code combination is good and interesting for people on its own, because we also had a lot of feedback that just people randomly type in a combination to get something like a jackpot. So let's see what I'm getting. You wouldn't be able to get this with the QR code with numbers. You could, but you have too many options with four digit numbers to have the luck to receive anything. So that's the motivation, but I really must say that we are not at the end at all.
Speaker 2:And again, would we be doing this externally? Probably would be finished by the time we opened the exhibitions a year ago, but that was only the time we started, when the exhibitions were opened, although we did loads of work here before that on temporary exhibitions on other locations, in the premises of Slavic National Gallery in other towns of Slovakia. So we would be finished because we wouldn't have enough budget or we wouldn't be able to define the scope of the work. So, precisely because we found out that One part of the app, which is not the digital guide when you enter the code, but the one where we Try to make some kind of storytelling narrative to enhance the visit for the people on site, doesn't really work, for maybe obvious reasons or some other usability reasons, so we are downscaling this part to Maybe replace it with trails which lead people along the exhibition, with a scavenger hunt which is giving you the option to run around and find a list of items by typing the codes.
Speaker 2:When you see them, then getting a free coffee and discount in the bookshop. So there is no way we could do that, the same way as we wouldn't be able to make such an extended incremental development with online collection in the course of eight years. It's been probably eight years since we develop online collection, and the same goes for Atlas digital guide that we've been working on three years and again it's not even finished yet. So we would be finished if it wasn't for internal development team.
Speaker 1:And finally, you know it sounds like you're at this quite exciting point at S&G. You've got more exhibition space to play with in the buildings. You've got this in house team that's trying new things. You've got a relatively new institutional website. You're supporting the sector more widely. What are you excited about that's coming up that you and your team are working on?
Speaker 2:I think it's still the interactive or the digital interpretation layer inside of the exhibition spaces, because that's still something we really haven't mastered yet, although we had temporary exhibitions where we've been playing with some solutions we developed ourselves also or even are used by just taking existing tool.
Speaker 2:But this is a different field in the sense that it's meant to be there for a long time, not just for three months, and in three months you don't have enough time to iterate that much and be.
Speaker 2:It's most of the time this one one track pony stuff which many institutions are financing, and that's the downside of it. Of course you can make a firework digital thing, get your exhibition for half a year, but how could you invest that budget you have more strategically and spread it on a longer time scale, for example, by developing a touch screen based app for digital interpretation, for showing the sides of the sculptures which you can't see when they are exhibited, to Be able to zoom into details or to make more playful, without making it a one off thing, and interconnecting the content you have and the and the, the tag you have on top of online collection, on top of the design systems we are already developing. So this is what I'm excited but also unsure how it will turn out, because we really find out that that on site Digital is a different discipline than the online one, which in a sense is more straightforward.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm really interested and excited to see what your team come up with and I will put links to everything we've discussed in today's show notes and I would encourage everyone to take a look at your website. And the next time listeners room Bratislava they should go and check out the exhibition space at the slow art National Gallery. It's by the river. It's very beautiful. But thank you so much for your time today. It's a pleasure talking to you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and I'm looking forward for the listeners to come to visit us. If you come and you drop me an email, I will be glad to show you around, thank you.
Speaker 1:And that is everything for today. Thanks for listening. You can find all episodes of the podcast, sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, the digital dot works. You can also find us on LinkedIn. Now that Twitter is a total garbage fire, our theme tune is Vienna, beat by blue dot sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.