Businessperson Ali Armağan Daloğlu's interest in collecting, which started with a wooden piggy bank, inspired his later works on collecting and museology.
Daloğlu, who founded Turkey's first museum with a piggy bank theme, launched the BirKültür Initiative Platform, which provides direct services to museums on issues such as preventive conservation and restoration activities, digital documentation, processing and inventory creation processes, based on the idea that museums can also have piggy banks.
Özlem Dengiz Uğur, the museum's director, said that by digitizing traditional museums, they aim to create spaces that people of all walks of life and ages can benefit from.
As per the legislation, a virtual museum can not be opened if the museum does not exist physically. In that sense, the concept of "micro-museum" changes this understanding and focuses more on presenting the stories of the objects and creating a unique experience for its visitors rather than viewing many objects side by side, Uğur added.
Compared to the physical smallness of micro-museums, the digital version offers a comprehensive museum infrastructure, reaching out to large communities, rather than a limited audience by creating dynamic environments with a multidisciplinary perspective, Uğur noted.
Highlighting that micro and virtual museums can be a good opportunity for museum education, which is yet to receive its due appreciation in Turkey, Uğur stated that it is a field of education widely practiced in the world. "The children who live abroad view the museums in their cities as an educational space with the program developed aligned with their curriculum. Also, it is not a learning environment for children, but adults and certain disadvantaged patient groups," Uğur said.
The museum was opened on April 12, 2021.
"Museum Kumbaram (My Piggy Bank Museum) is the smallest museum in Turkey in terms of physical space by emphasizing the power of hybrid museology with its ever-expanding and unlimited possibilities in the digital field," Uğur highlighted.
The museum has more than 2,000 piggy banks, while only 10 of them are registered and exhibited, and the museum director highlights that it is not a "piggy bank museum." The name is based on the metaphor that museums serve as piggy banks that collect culture and memory.
The museum provides guidance services to its visitors while they also plan to offer training for different age groups on the culture of saving and sparing for the protection of the environment.
"It is not practical to turn museums into large chunks of collections when there are many procedures for the preservation and display," Uğur said.
Pointing out that virtual museums should be used in a more functional way, rather than just taking the digital mold of their realities and constructing them as places that can only be navigated with a computer mouse. "When you click on an object in the exhibition area in Muze Kumbaram, you can see its entire tag. In this regard, we come to the fore with our digital infrastructure. We're constantly trying to update it," he said.
BirKultür Initiative Platform provides technical and official services to individuals and institutions for those who want to present their collections.
