Erika Taylor works in a niche profession as a digital heritage specialist and curator, and while she is located in the coastal village of Lennox Head, her work takes her all over the world. She is one of 50 local creative professionals who have joined Arts Northern Rivers' online creative hub The Hive. We spoke to her about her passion for bringing museums into the digital age.

1. Tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, your parents, where you studied etc.

My parents own the Lennox Head backpackers hostel, which is where I grew up surrounded by exotic accents, different cultures, and people of every race, colour, and creed. In many ways an idyllic childhood on the beach, however, as I became older, the small town lifestyle couldn't fulfill my needs and I moved to Sydney to complete my Science undergraduate degree. I've really always been a science nerd at heart!

2. What drew you to this area of study and knowledge that is now referred to as 'material culture'.

After I finished my degree I set off to travel around the world. During this time museums became my 'safe house', just about every town in the world has one, they are inexpensive for the broke traveller to visit, and offer a quiet space to collect your thoughts. At worst they are filled to the brim with 'stuff' to explore, at best they display the history of a place and evoke an emotional response from those that visit.

I returned to Sydney inspired and completed my Masters in Museum Studies, after which I scored a job as a science curator at the Powerhouse Museum. I looked after collections of historic plastics, merino wool, and health and medicine, the Museum has an amazing collection of close to one million objects. The more I worked with material culture, the more interested I became in how we could use it online to reach out and engage our audiences in that space.

3. Why is it that 'things' are so important to people?

I think 'stuff' has always been important to people, and just about everyone is a collector in some sense. 'Stuff' can be a judge of your worth, it can a trigger a memory of another time, it can tell us where we have been, it can also tell us where we are going.

Museums act as a vault for material culture, a snapshot of different times in history, a record of the community, and perhaps more important museums exist for the community. Museums represent the people, with the purpose to procure, preserve, protect, present and educate the community. 

4. Some people still have an outdated image of museums as dusty storehouses full of glass cases and cobwebs, and of curators as equally antiquated. Really, how much and in what ways has that changed?

Museums are currently undergoing complete transformation, spurred on by digital technology. The use of this technology allows visitors to be much more involved and engaged in what is happening in their local museum.

As an example the last exhibition I worked on had a space about weather, including a large screen that was showing images of extreme weather events. The images were actually streaming from the photographic social media site Flickr, where I had created a group for weather enthusiasts to upload their photos. This not only provided real time content streaming into the exhibition (we had images of the QLD floods while it was all still happening), but prompted visitors to the physical exhibition to extend their visit using the digital space when they got home.

There are some really exciting projects going on at the moment. Some examples include the museum's releasing of large historic photographic collections online under a creative commons license, which allows people to freely use, manipulate, and share photographs they would otherwise have had no access to. Museums were also among the first groups to use 'crowd-sourcing', for instance creating online games that actually help catalogue a museum's collection.

My area of expertise is getting museums' staff to think about how they can reach out to people in a digital space and think beyond those dusty showcases.

5. And computer and phone apps and games...what kind of influence are they having on the world of the museum?

Apps have allowed people to walk around with a museum in their pocket! It has taken the museum outside of a physical building and into the streets. The possibilities for this new museum experience are just about endless but some great applications include; curator led walking tours of historic pubs, beautiful scientific field guides to local flora and fauna, or you can visit a street museum which allows you to see historic photos overlaid onto the exact location they were taken .
A museum no longer has four walls to contain all its stuff. Computer technology has allowed the stuff to explode out and onto the street.

6. One of your specialist areas is social media and its use in museums. Can you tell us briefly about your research paper 'The Impact of Blogs and Other Social Media on the Life of a Curator'?

During my years at the Powerhouse Museum I spearheaded projects that got curators involved with social media. I started the Museum's first curatorial blog, which allowed the public to have direct contact with curators to discuss stories, debate history, and interact with the collection. I also opened up our public enquiries system that allowed the public to ask the curators questions through their Facebook profiles, or through the Museum's Twitter account. This was a completely new way of working for traditional curators.

My research paper surveyed over 100 curatorial staff internationally to see what kind of impact social media was having on curatorial practice. The results showed we still had a long way to go in integrating social media and other digital practices into how curators complete their work.

7. Do you think there will ever be purely online museums?

Absolutely, and they exist already. Places like the NSW Migration Heritage Centre collect digital oral histories from migrant communities, and numerous exclusively online art museums are beginning to emerge. Online museums will have to exist in the near future as our world becomes more and more digital, leaving behind a trail of digital artifacts that will need to be preserved. Museums are only just beginning to tackle the issues of how to collect and preserve digital born objects such as photographs, computer programs, apps, websites, and other digitally created ephemera.

8. As far as I know there are no museums in Lennox Head, so how can you follow your particular passion in a small coastal village?

In my perfect world Lennox Head would have a museum! Which is why I am working on setting up the Lennox Head Historical Society. I have discovered that the town actually has the most wonderful collection of photographs of the beach and lake from the 1950s onwards. Wonderful shots of beach life with rows of FJ Holdens lined up along the beach, and the ladies all in fantastic vintage swimming costumes.

I am currently a sole trader, so museums, historical societies, galleries, or other groups can contract me to come to them to complete short projects or run workshops for curators and educators. Being in Lennox is actually really handy for my work being so close to both Ballina and the Gold Coast airports.

The Northern Rivers has a fantastic artistic and creative community, I'm hoping to use The Hive to link up with local creative professionals to work on some exciting projects for 2012.

9. Where do you see yourself taking your career in the near, and not so near future? Do you have any specific plans for 2012?

In April I'm off to the Mecca for museum folk, the Museums and the Web conference in San Diego, USA. Then I will nip over to New York to for a speaking engagement at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City, followed by the Smithsonian in Washington D.C to speak to their curators and education teams. I will no doubt be missing the beach by then and return to Lennox Head to work on more local contracts. I feel extremely blessed to be in the position I am in, the world really is my oyster.