This project explored how the ‘digitality’ of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection has changed since the museum began collecting digital art in the mid-century by looking at a selection of objects from the Digital Art and Design Collection. It also evaluated current acquisition workflows and developed a bespoke ‘How-To’ guide and questionnaire for digital objects to better suit the complex nature of collecting digital material.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, holds over 400 born-digital objects. However, the performative and networked ontology of digital objects poses a problem for museums, particularly at the point of acquisition, as present workflows are designed for the collection of analogue material. However, documentation, best practices for display, preservation, and interpretation must be carefully considered at the point of acquisition when faced with the possibility that, in the future, the technology that hosts digital objects will fail.

Addressing these concerns was the focus of a project undertaken in the Design and Digital (D&D) curatorial section at the V&A. The project aimed to answer the following questions:

• How have V&A curators interpreted digital objects since starting the collection of digital art in the mid-century?
• What are the present challenges to acquiring born-digital objects both at the V&A and in museums generally?
• What interventions might be made in the V&A’s acquisitions workflow to alleviate challenges during the acquisition of born-digital objects?

Although based in D&D, the project involved staff in conservation, collections management, and other curatorial sections such as Photography, which are also actively collecting born-digital material. The project used qualitative methods, including an integrative literature review, desk-based archival research on a selection of case studies in the D&D collection, semi-structured interviews with staff and a collaborative workshop. The research revealed both technical issues around digital acquisitions when using current workflows, as well as a concerned discourse about the acquisition of digital objects by staff. These findings informed the project’s outputs: an internal research report and an acquisitions “how-to guide” and questionnaire for digital objects. The V&A’s website was also updated to include a history of digital collecting, as well as a blog post about the project.