2020 in brief: interaction

2020 was the year of lockdowns, working from home and social distancing, which resulted in us interacting digitally more than ever before. Our platforms were a huge help with this – all the pieces of the puzzle for how we work together are on these channels, after all. As an end user, it’s where you can find the content our partners have specially selected for you.

We’ve worked hard over the past year to make sure our platforms fit in with your world even better. Read how we’ve done this below.

The Archive for Education: more relevant than ever

The coronavirus pandemic, and the restrictions it imposed on us, turned our world upside-down. For teachers, it meant they had to rethink their whole way of teaching, and remote learning forced them to become even more creative and flexible than ever before. At the request of Ministers Jambon and Weyts, we seized the opportunity to provide the best possible support to the education system for lessons that could not be held at school.

We did this by making our platform, The Archive for Education, accessible for secondary school students. This innovation was already planned, but we accelerated it out of necessity. In anticipation of the new, updated Archive for Education, we made every effort to provide students with manual, GDPR-proof access to our educational platform until the end of the school year. And we succeeded: over 42,000 students made their way there during the first lockdown.

The Archive for Education home page - in Dutch.

The official launch of the new Archive for Education followed in September. One of the main updates is the optimised workspace where secondary teachers can now share materials with their students for watching and listening assignments. In order to make things even easier for users, we also introduced an improved search function and a more intuitive user experience.

The range of materials available on our educational platform continued to grow in 2020 as we expanded our offering with audiovisual content specially selected by our editors for use in education. New materials also flowed in as a result of requests from users themselves.

The new search function for The Archive for Education - in Dutch, registration/login required

Specifically, we helped primary school teachers in their search for high-quality audiovisual content, and substantially expanded our offering with relevant materials by:

We also had to take our training online; after all, the pandemic meant we could no longer meet in person for a while. But this didn’t stop teachers from enthusiastically following our workshops. We helped them on their way in 78 training sessions and webinars on our educational platform. The great demand for online educational tools and support meant we even exceeded our target, and our content partners were able to count on our support too. In 2020, we opened our education helpdesk, which enables us to give customised supervision to partners in bringing their audiovisual archive content into the classroom.

artinflanders.be ready for launch

Following our merger in 2019, the Lukas image database was given a new identity: artinflanders.be was born. We added the characteristic meemoo colours to their website and took the opportunity to optimise their download options. The Vergader met kunst (’Meeting with art’) campaign offered people working from home during the lockdown the chance to escape reality for a moment and dress up their obligatory Zoom calls with a lot more style. The result? You happily said goodbye to any piles of laundry in the background and started downloading in droves: we recorded an impressive 170% increase in downloads. Moreover our target of 100 image sales turned out to be much too modest as we ultimately sold 934.

The new Art in Flanders website.

Last year we welcomed the Koninklijke Hoofdgilde Sint-Sebastiaan Brugge (‘Royal Guild of Saint Sebastian in Bruges’) as a new partner. In 88 images available via artinflanders.be, you can follow the rich history of this association that has existed since the fourteenth century.

2020 went down in the (art) history books as the ‘Van Eyck Year’. We celebrated this by digitising the panels from the Lamb of God Altarpiece once the second phase of restoration was complete. The photographic reproductions of the world’s most famous lamb even managed to cause a stir in the international press.

>> Do you want the Lamb of God in the background for your meetings?

The Archive in full bloom

In 2020, The Archive was the first stop in your search for images and audio from the Flemish media, cultural and government sectors. This growing platform bridges the gap between the general public and our content partners’ archive content. Did you notice The Archive appearing on your Facebook timeline or in Google adverts this year? It would not be a coincidence: our marketing team ran several campaigns to highlight the platform, and these efforts produced some promising results. We received over 100 requests per month via this channel in 2020.

Did you know that The Archive is also serving as a springboard for a new, comprehensive platform to cover all our current interaction channels? More about this below.

New platform under construction

Imagine: all the content from our interaction platforms combined in a single, central location – convenient and with targeted browsing. In 2020, together with our content partners, end users and an external consultant, we considered what an overarching platform such as this could look like. And we’ve already drawn up the outlines for this concept, but we will have to wait until 2021 for the more detailed roadmap.

At meemoo, we do not only share content, but also expertise. Curious to discover what we achieved in 2020?

>> Find out here