Our bold ambition.
Our mission statement: to build a software and service platform that helps museums tell their incredible stories with a beautiful, coherent and robust set of digital tools.
Every museum – whatever their size – needs and deserves to be on the web, showing the world who they are and what they do. But for museums with limited resources and support, it is often too hard to take those crucial first steps that should establish their digital presence. Too hard, too costly, and too intimidating.
The team behind The Museum Platform have been working in the sector for a long time, both inside museums and for specialist agencies. Each of us has seen independently how tough it is to get established in the digital world when addressed by the constraints that face most of the UK’s thousands of museums, and we are united in our frustration at this.
We decided to tackle the problem by building a software and service platform that would support museums to get online for the first time and then to gain increasing digital independence and confidence.
Like what we’re doing, have something to ask, or just want to say hello?
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Who we are
The Museum Platform is a collaboration between Thirty8 Digital (Mike Ellis), Knowledge Integration (Rob Tice) and Sesamoid Consulting (Jeremy Ottevanger); a team who have been working in the museum and heritage space for many years. We brought our organisations together to try to crack a problem that needs a range of capacities and experience that are rarely found in one place.
Mike Ellis has been creating digital products in and for museums for more than two decades. He has spent much of this time seeking answers to the question, “how can we get this to work for small organisations and their users?”. Mike and Rachel Ellis run Thirty8 Digital, an agency working almost exclusively with museums, providing and supporting beautiful, innovative but realistic digital solutions to help museums reach their audiences.
Rob Tice is the technical sage of the group, having worked on knowledge management systems since the ’90s, largely in the heritage field. He can’t resist hardcore development work, but always to solve human problems. As a director of Knowledge Integration he brings the strength of that company to build the infrastructure that brings your collections to light through the Museum Platform.
When in 1999 Jeremy Ottevanger took a role as a developer/editor of an “online museum” of prehistory it wasn’t obvious that this would become a career of building websites for museums. He has generally taken technical roles but a lot of his work has concerned bridging the gap between the museum’s systems and assets, the ambitions of the institution, and the needs of its visitors. He now consults for museums facing these challenges.