As the national maritime museum, we have a unique responsibility to share the nation’s maritime stories with communities across the country, as well as internationally. We recognise that the ways in which audiences engage with museums are changing and we employ best-practice community research to inform every aspect of our programming and nationwide engagement. Our ongoing support of regional maritime projects and our collaboration with community stakeholders around Australia will ensure public pride and ownership in the museum.

Performance criterion

The key performance measures of sharing the national maritime story are:

• total number of annual offsite visitors to the organisation
• total number of annual online visits
• percentage of the total collection available to the public online by 2022
• percentage of the total collection digitised.

Criterion source

2018–19 Portfolio Budget Statements (PBS), p 141; 2018–22 Corporate Plan, p 17

Results against performance

Offsite visitation

Online visitation

Online access to the National Maritime Collection

Methodology

Offsite visitation is determined through aggregation of actual attendance data provided by various borrowing institutions. It also includes attendees to talks given by the volunteer Museum Speakers group.

Online visitation is the number of visits to the museum’s website (www.sea.museum), calculated by Google Analytics. Online visitation includes participation in online education programs, including online courses and virtual excursions, as well as The Voyage game. Online visitation does not include visitors to the museum’s social media pages or blogs or downloads of the museum app or visits by museum staff.

All data pertaining to collection item management is recorded in or derived from the museum’s collection management system (TMS). The percentage of collection objects digitised is based on the percentage of objects in the collection for which there is at least one digital image at 30 June.

All supporting data for the analysis is actuals collected at the operational level.

Analysis

Offsite visitation

The museum’s strategy to increase its national and international presence has been effective. This was the best year on record for offsite visitation to the museum’s exhibitions. This year 52% of total visitors were offsite – which is well ahead of the average over the last decade (34.5%).

Percentage offsite visitation 2009–10 to 2018–19

Touring exhibitions

In 2018–19 there were 1,082,253 visitors to the museum’s travelling exhibitions in Australia and overseas and 7,339 visitors to talks by the volunteer Museum Speakers group.

The standout exhibitions were Voyage to the Deep (316,321), Horrible Histories^® Pirates – the exhibition (159,495) and Container: the box that changed the world (59,129).

Flatpack exhibitions have proven to be a popular and cost-effective way of sharing the maritime story. Guardians of Sunda Strait, which toured the USA, was the most popular (195,054), and Shackleton: Escape from Antarctica, which continued its tour throughout Australia, was also a great success (47,492). The Submerged – Stories of Australia’s shipwrecks flatpack was seen by 90,523 people in six jurisdictions this year.

Information about the museum’s touring exhibitions is included in the Annual Report (see Touring exhibitions).

This year the museum toured 20 exhibitions in total. Six of these exhibitions were displayed at 12 international venues, and 18 exhibitions were displayed at 82 venues throughout Australia with distribution set out in the following table:

This year the volunteer Speakers Group delivered 146 talks to a total audience of 7,339.

Online visitation

The overhaul of the museum’s website commenced this year, including the consolidation of the various micro-sites and a new URL (www.sea.museum). Despite this significant change, online visitation was the second-highest on record (only 16,372 behind the best year) and a very strong result (52% ahead of target).

This year’s result was due to several major initiatives – strong public relations and online marketing of the museum’s exhibitions and programs, as well as the online collection and the popularity of The Voyage game. Set in 1830, The Voyage game allows school children to take on the role of surgeon superintendent aboard a convict vessel transporting its human cargo from Britain to the far reaches of the known world – Van Diemen’s Land. In 2018–19, there were 253,102 visits to The Voyage game website with an average dwell time of more than 18 minutes.

There are currently four online exhibitions on the museum’s website. One new exhibition, Sea of Rainbow, was added this year. Total visitation to the online exhibitions was 263 in 2018–19.

In 2018–19, there were about 7.1 million page views of the museum’s websites, compared to about 8 million in 2017–18. This is an extraordinary result given that the website was consolidated, and the number of pages was reduced this year.

Digitisation and digital access to the National Maritime Collection

In November 2016, the museum officially launched the ‘Unlocking the Collection’ initiative, which provides the public with access to digital images and information about objects in the collection. As at 30 June 2019, there were 101,182 objects available online. There were 72,905 visits to the online collection this year (up from 51,107 last year).

There were 4,762 objects digitised in 2018–19. As at 30 June 2019, 90,960 objects, or 61.23% of the objects in the National Maritime Collection, had been digitised. This result was on target. The priorities of digitisation are determined by the museum’s digitisation strategy. All high-value items and new acquisitions have been digitised. The majority of the museum’s unpublished manuscript diaries and logs have been digitised this year.