Museums Platform
a unified digital presence for a decentralized museum network

The Archaeological State Museum of Baden-Württemberg (ALM BW) operates as a decentralized network comprising a main museum, a central artifact archive, and seven branch museums across the state. Its holdings include over four million archaeological finds representing more than 40,000 years of cultural history. The goal of this project was to make key objects from these collections publicly accessible through an open-source digital platform. The design and infrastructure were to be aligned with the FAIR data principles—ensuring that content would be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

In my role as in-house Digital Manager for User Experience at the main museum in Constance, I led the strategic planning and design of the digital collection. The stakeholder group was diverse and included museum leadership, researchers, educators, and IT staff. Through stakeholder workshops, I facilitated alignment on critical aspects such as the taxonomy, varying levels of content detail, and overall data quality. I also contributed to advancing the digitization process itself—helping to prioritize key objects and initiate the 3D scanning of selected highlights for long-term digital use.

To support meaningful exploration and discovery, I developed an interface concept that allows two distinct but complementary access modes: a visually rich card view and a geographically structured map view, both driven by a consistent thematic filtering system. This approach draws from best practices in digital cultural heritage design, especially the concept of generous interfaces (Whitelaw, 2015), which advocate for open-ended, exploratory access instead of traditional linear navigation.

Academic research confirms that providing multiple points of entry—by topic, location, or object type—reflects how users naturally explore content and supports deeper engagement with complex collections (Windhager et al., 2018). The card view allows for quick visual scanning and side-by-side comparison of objects, while the map view enables users to uncover spatial relationships and regional narratives within the archaeological record.