Founded in 2020, the Museum Publishing Digital Interest Group is an open community for sharing and discussing digital publishing ideas and issues with colleagues. We organize bimonthly webinars featuring different community members sharing projects and ideas. While our focus is on museum publishing, sign-ups are open to anyone interested in the field.

While digital publishing has seen a radical ascendance since the release of the Kindle in 2007 (with ebooks having become as ubiquitous as print in some genres) digital publishing for art and museum books has lagged behind. Whether this is due to a lack of appropriate publishing formats and distribution points for our material, or a lack of technological expertise in our sector, it is important to remember we are still in the very early days of the medium.

This group is born largely from staff at public institutions who share a mission to make our cultural heritage open and accessible, who regularly face unique technological and pedagogical problems that require a high degree of critical thinking and problem solving, and who have demonstrated a creative and collaborative sensibility. We take the optimistic view that we are now in a position to push digital publishing forward for ourselves and for the benefit of publishing at large. To this end, it is our mission to support one another in this endeavor and to actively engage others around us in discussions about the future intersections of publishing and technology. We are interested in the following areas:

• Project Sharing: failures and successes, in progress, break-out examples, aspirations, advice on platforms, lessons learned, integration of pubs and gallery experiences, experiments and works in progress, cross- and multi-media formats, collection publishing, digital humanities projects
• Professional Development: news and event announcements, team-building, who’s out there, networking, conferences, advice, commiseration
• Discussion: storytelling and story development, content strategy, publishing philosophy, audience development and analysis, scholarly publishing techniques, workflows, organizational and team structures, the editor’s perspective, physical/digital interchange, cross-discipline and cross-institutional collaboration, immersive environments, publishing as a tool to broaden access and engagement, as a tool for inclusion and social justice, expanding the definition of publishing, transparency, the future, all the things
• Tools: use cases, functional requirements, best practices and successful toolchains, documentation, editorial approaches, boring-but-practical details of process, information management, statistical methods, data visualization, digital design and typography, design thinking, UX/UI, wireframing tools and methods, e-book development and production. distribution, web development (html, css, js), open source, CMSs, GitHub, web frameworks, LOD, VR