Museikon, from physical to virtual reality: a continuous challenge

Being the result of an EEA Grants funding, a mandatory requirement for Museikon was the opening to the public of the entire collection of icons and ancient books, which was accomplished by digitizing and displaying the approximately 3600 objects at the time on Museikon’s website and on europeana.eu website. In the context of the Covid pandemic, Museikon was closed to the public between April 2020 and April 2021. Being in the sustainability period, Museikon could not simply suspend its educational activity while the world was flooded with online approach facilities. As a result of the collaboration with the Kunstmatrix platform, all our exhibitions have moved to the virtual space, and the museum education classes and the conferences have been organized through Google Meet and Zoom video communication services. The social impact simply exploded, although we have to be realistic and accept that there must have been a significant difference between the number of those who morally supported us and those who actually watched the events. The major challenge was precisely this inability to have the exact image of the views, Kunstmatrix refusing to provide this information, which is why we suspended the collaboration and endeavoured to organize our own virtual space.


The Material Digital Humanities seminar is co-hosted by the Digital Humanities Research Hub, University of London, UK, and Star-UBB Institute of Advanced Studies, University Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj Napoca, Romania.