Week 5 Blog Post

This week’s readings, particularly Museums See Different Virtues in Virtual Worlds, highlighted questions that I had not started to fully consider before completing the readings.  Specifically, I became interested in the notion of funding and revenue for museums.  As a World Arts and Cultures major, I tend to focus on the content and curation of museums when i am considering them.  However, as we further discussions about museums’ transition to the digital, new factors begin to arise. As the Gat article highlights, shifting to technology shifts the dynamic of the museum-goers.  Understanding new ways to determine success becomes crucial within this transition.

With the transition to the digital space, museums must consider and contest their goal with their financial concerns.  By this I mean to suggest that museums often, when speaking of their digital information, claim that the transition will make the pieces within the museum more accessible to the public.  However, at what point does making a collection available online hurt the museum’s profit.  Will museums eventually become more concerned with making a profit than distributing their information to the general public? Will they eventually begin charging people to look at their collections online?

The answers to these questions will be very interesting.  It is my hope that museums will be able to keep people visiting in person and online.  However, if this trend is not the case, museums must critically consider what they believe their role to be within society.  Museums that decide to disseminate information to the public in the hopes of expanding education and interest in art will have a very different answer than museums that simply hope to make a profit.  I believe that this transition to the digital gives museums the option to redefine their own role.

2 thoughts on “Week 5 Blog Post”

  1. It’s interesting to think about the future of online museum collections – specifically whether museums are going to start charging people to view them. Newspapers have already adopted online subscriptions to cover their exponential drop in print subscriptions. Newspapers didn’t have to rely so heavily on online subscriptions in the past when print subscriptions were still a major source of profit and people weren’t glued to their smartphones and iPads. For museums though, I think there is a value intrinsic to on-site visits that won’t ever fade away, even in today’s digital age. Maybe it’s our human awareness of what is real and not real and the self-assuring, smug notion of, “Yes! I’ve seen the real thing!” that creates that intrinsic value. But I don’t see foot traffic dropping to such a point that museums have to make their revenue through charging online “visits”.

  2. I agree that putting everything online for museums needing the profit from visitor admission to survive is a very real concern. However I believe that most people go to a museum for the atmosphere and the wonder over the pure information that can be increasingly found online. I don’t think museums should be too concerned Until it becomes common place for someone say that they’d rather not go to a museum because they can fully experience it on their Ipad.

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