Cindy Zalm

Cindy Zalm is Head of Realization and Delivery at the Wereldmuseum, a Dutch museum organization comprising three museums across different cities. In her role, she oversees project management, IT, and collection management. Guided by the Wereldmuseum’s mission and vision, Cindy is committed to making the museum’s collections as accessible as possible, not only for audiences in the Netherlands, but also for communities connected to and represented within the collections’ origins. The Wereldmuseum is part of the Dutch Consortium for Colonial Collections.

Cindy Zalm will be speaking at the Digital Collections Summit 2026 :

Arm chair travelling into storage

Armchair travel has long offered a way to discover distant places and cultures for those who didn’t have the opportunity to travel. At the Wereldmuseum, we are committed to making our collections accessible to scholars, makers, and communities connected to the objects we preserve. We also recognize that for many people outside the Netherlands, visiting our museums and storage facilities can be difficult or impossible. To address this, we developed a process for digital storage visits, as a way of arm chair traveling, that enables close visual examination of objects remotely. In this contribution, we present the approach, its possibilities, and how other museums can implement it.