A Proposed New Distributed Museum at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Leveraging Digital Content

This article describes steps being taken at Milano-Bicocca University to set up a distributed university museum accessible to teachers, students, and the wider community. Traditional university museums are places and collections that over the centuries have enriched the educational offering of their institutions and served as a resource for research and scientific inquiry. In recent decades, the emphasis has been on sharing and increasing participation in these cultural heritage sites by opening them up to the community, thereby extending the university’s educational outreach. In the project at Milano- Bicocca, a young and interdisciplinary university that has just celebrated the 20th anniversary of its founding, the first step in the process has been to inventorize the objects currently held by each department, with a view to assessing the existing range of potential exhibits and deciding how best to exploit them. Initially these cultural objects will be on display in a digital environment, designed to make them known to larger audiences and stimulate new research ideas. In preparation for this step, the university and its fledgling distributed museum took part in the online event Milano MuseoCity, held from March 2 to March 7, 2021, with a focus on the theme of secret museums. For its debut at this event, the University of Milano-Bicocca presented three main cultural objects, thus keeping the university “top of mind” – despite the ongoing public health emergency – as a place of education and research, but also as a space of encounter and dynamic cultural growth.