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Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Nine Museums From The Highlands and Islands Now Have Their Digital Collections and Stories Featured on Leading Global App Smartify

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From discovering history in the landscape around the beautiful village of Gairloch to delighting your senses with the sights, sounds and smells of the past around Strathnaver, nine Highlands and Islands museums have brought their collections and stories together offering a gateway into the heritage and culture of this stunning region for a global cultural audience through the museum app Smartify.

Thanks to a unique collaboration between XpoNorth Digital, Highlands and Islands Enterprise’s specialist digital support programme for the creative and heritage sectors, and Smartify, the world’s most downloaded museum app, art and history lovers from all over the world can now interact with Highland heritage and culture from wherever they are in the world and start planning their visit from the comfort of their own homes.

These immersive experiences are also on offer to all in person visitors, helping to improve their experience with new ways to interact with stories and artefacts in museums and the surrounding landscape.

Following on from a successful first year, Orkney Museum, The Argyll Collection and Strathnaver Museum join the original 6 museums (Gairloch Museum, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Brora Heritage Centre, Stromness Museum, The Highlanders’ Museum and Cromarty Courthouse Museum) on the platform, with a specially curated portal for the Highlands and Islands that showcases the very best in Highland heritage with stunning audio, video and photographic collections, alongside e-commerce opportunities, enabling audiences to engage with archives, artefacts and stories from across the region.

All nine museums are now available to view here: https://app.smartify.org/en-GB/venues/xponorth

Two stand out stories recently added to the Highlands and Islands Smartify portal include the story of the Scar Plaque, now found in Orkney museum, telling the story of the importance of women in Viking history and the 4,000 year old Chealamy beaker found in a prehistoric burial chamber in the 1980s, now on show at Strathnaver museum, and tells the story of beaker culture in the Highlands and how culture could have spread across Europe.

Both objects are beautifully decorated and are examples of the importance of objects to our ancestors – the story of the objects alongside images and audio allow audiences to immersive themselves in the rich history and culture of the Highlands, encouraging visitors to slow down, look more deeply and get off the beaten track.

Smartify is available on iOS and Android from the App Store and Google Play respectively and is also available on the web via app.smartify.org

Nicola Henderson, XpoNorth Digital’s Heritage Advisor, said:

“When visitors think of coming to Scotland, they are often thinking of the Highlands – of its history, its culture, its landscape, its people.

“By bringing together a diverse range of stories from nine leading Highland cultural organisations on the world’s most downloaded museum app, we can showcase that history, culture and landscape to a culturally engaged audience, helping to build relationships with a global audience interested in Highland culture and heritage, encouraging them to engage with our museums and visit our region in a responsible way.

“This will help to build new audiences for our museums, with informed visitors, encouraging them to spend more time in parts of our region that are often overlooked.”

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