🏰 What crosses your mind when someone mentions the “National Palace Museum”? Is it its rich collection of treasures and solemn courtyards, or its status as an international museum with a long history that is still able to keep up with the times and dare to embrace the spirit of openness and collaboration?

💡 Since last month, my office (PDIS, the Executive Yuan’s Public Digital Innovation Space) has officially launched a collaborative program with the Forbidden City at the invitation of the National Palace Museum’s President, Wu Mi-cha. In the next few months, we will be assisting the National Palace Museum in redesigning programs such as automatic ticket purchases, online bookings and entry lines. Through processes such as interviews with multiple stakeholders; completely recorded collaborative discussions with users and full process preliminary testing and other procedures, the National Palace Museum will be offering visitors a convenient and comfortable ticket purchasing experience that is closer to their true feelings.

📖 This represents another step forward by the National Palace Museum on its path of openness and collaboration. In July two years ago, under the impetus of former president Lin Cheng-i, the National Palace Museum opened more than 70,000 cultural relics in the form of open materials, so that any person could download and use them free of charge. Under the continuing efforts of the two succeeding presidents, Ch’en Ch’i-nan and Wu Mi-cha, the number of open materials has reached more than 100,000. Although the speed and quantity of the materials are still not as strong as the materials offered by the Metropolitan Museum of New York or the National Palace Museum of the Netherlands, the National Palace Museum is already at the forefront and has great symbolic significance compared to similar tier museums in Asia. In the near future, the National Palace Museum will continue to expand and deepen the quality of its open materials with the support of the forward-looking infrastructure budget. This is well worth everyone’s anticipation.

🔮 Furthermore, the National Palace Museum has demonstrated ingenuity in its innovative use of new media. In February last year, I “inhabited” a free-moving robot that was equipped with a 360-degree panoramic lens. In my first visit to the Southern Court of the National Palace Museum, President Lin Cheng-i and hundreds of people were online at the same time, along with viewers who watched the video afterwards. Together, we viewed the “The Pinnacle of Japanese Art: Exhibit from the Collection of Tokyo/Kyushu National Museum” which was extremely rare to see in Taiwan. For me, this viewing experience that transcended temporal and spatial constraints definitely represented a new path to enable the National Palace Museum to improve publicity and establish new paradigms.

🌈 The essence of the National Palace Museum lies in its steadfast preservation of its precious collection that captures fleeting beauties in moments of history; at the same time, how the Museum should adapt to the times so that more viewers can use multiple ways to gain access and understand the National Palace Museum represents not only an opportunity for us to grasp but also a responsibility for us to achieve change.