Can Small Museums Develop Compelling, Educational and Accessible Web Resources? The Case of Accademia Carrara

Due to the lack of budget, competence, personnel and time, small museums are often unable to develop compelling, educational and accessible web resources for their permanent collections or temporary exhibitions. In an attempt to prove that investing in these types of resources can be very fruitful even for small institutions, we will illustrate the case of Accademia Carrara, a museum in Bergamo, northern Italy, which, for a current temporary exhibition on Cézanne and Renoir’s masterpieces from the Paul Guillaume collection, developed a series of multimedia applications, including an accessible website, rich in content and educational material [www.cezannerenoir.it]. SMALL MUSEUMS AND THE DIFFICULTIES OF DEVELOPING MULTIMEDIA RESOURCES Developing compelling educational and accessible web resources for the public often demands time, money and competences that most cultural institutions, museums in particular, do not necessarily possess. The problem is even more evident in small institutions (e.g., see [5]) where most of the energies are invested in what museum administrators not unreasonably consider more urgent needs such as security, personnel, restoration, temporary exhibitions, leaving the “educational” and “communicational” aspects, including the web, as a secondary issue. One of the factor that has contributed to this situation is the lack of financial support from local or national government (especially in southern European countries) which, after having contributed to the collections’ digitalization process, are now somewhat less eager to invest in the transformation of these resources into educational and entertaining services for the public. This means that cultural institutions have to finance these projects within heir own budget, leaving little margin for manoeuvre by small museums that already have difficulty surviving on their regular budgets. Even when external funding is made available for the development of multimedia resources, through the support of private sponsors, the projects are usually carried out outside of the institution itself by external companies. There is no real integration of the