Tripont at MuseumDigit

This year the Hungarian National Museum held MuseumDigit on 23–25 November. The museum has organised the international conference for players in cultural life since 2013. Among the participants was Tripont Cultural Heritage Solutions.

The museum’s venerable spaces hosted the exhibitors and the professional participants. The conference was divided into two parts, since cultural heritage preservation was represented in both its theoretical and its practical segments. Besides international and Hungarian speakers, companies also exhibited in order to present new museum-technology equipment and new technical advances in digitisation.

The event was opened by László L. Simon, Director General of the Hungarian National Museum, who in his speech stressed the importance of digitisation and digitalisation. Because of the pandemic, hybrid presentations were held, so speakers could log in from all over the world. Several renowned foreign speakers took part in the event; to highlight just a few without claiming completeness: Marc-Olivier Wahler, curator, critic, director of the Museum of Art and History in Geneva and one of the founders of the Swiss contemporary art centre CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel, and Marie Lavandier, director of the Louvre-Lens Museum in Lens, France. A particular curiosity of the Lens museum is that part of the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris is lent to it on a long-term basis, hence the name. Art historian Nathalie Bondil, cultural institution manager of L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, also took part in the conference. The French and Francophone dominance is no accident, since in France the theory and practice of cultural heritage preservation have a long tradition.

Photo: Hungarian National Museum©

Speakers also came from other parts of Europe, for example James M. Bradburne, British-Canadian architect, designer and museologist, director of the Pinacoteca di Brera and Biblioteca Braidense in Milan and founder of Circles Squared. The progressive group was formed in 2015 to support the work of those who want to create new, 21st-century museums or wish to change their existing museum, in both a theoretical and a practical museum-technology sense.

Photo: Hungarian National Museum©

Alongside the international field, a good number of speakers also came from the Hungarian museum sphere, among them Ildikó Sz. Fejes, head of department at the National Centre for Museological Methodology and Information (OMMIK) of the Hungarian National Museum, historian, archaeologist, specialist museologist, and Judit Horváth, head of department for the contemporary design collection at the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, but we may also mention Benedek Varga, former head of the Hungarian National Museum and currently Director General of the Semmelweis Museum of Medical History.

The programme offered an international and Hungarian outlook on important questions and topics of the museum world, such as the restart and rethinking after covid, the changes in the museum world and the museum models of the future, closely connected with which is the question of future-awareness. The two-day event offered the opportunity for professional discussions, which in light of last year’s online conference is particularly important, since in the past year the possibilities for holding professional events had been limited.

Photo: Hungarian National Museum©

The presentations took place in the museum’s ceremonial hall. Over the centuries the ancient hall has been the scene of numerous outstanding events; for example, the upper house of the 1848 popular-representation National Assembly sat in this hall, and after the Compromise the upper house operated here until 1902, when the Parliament building was completed. In the foyer in front of the ceremonial hall, in the exhibition space, the stands and equipment of various companies were lined up. The team of Tripont Cultural Heritage Solutions presented to those interested, with great success, Treventus’s automatic book scanner, the ScanRobot, Phase One’s camera system and its digital archive service, Heritage.

Photo: Hungarian National Museum©