Emotional connections with the past: Exploring engagement with historical images from an online museum collection

Many museums are taking steps to open their collections to the public online. The motivations for this are varied but raise new questions about how people make connections with the historical past. On the one hand, visitors are presented with forms of artefact other than the tangible content of a physical museum exhibition. On the other, the digitisation of the past brings with it the potential to explore and see the connectedness of museum items that support new forms of sense making for visitors. The idea of a “visitor”, in this context, is similarly taking on a new significance to museums, beyond that of the paying observer, referring to depth and range of knowledge, interests and degrees of engagement with the past.