An exploration of museums and virtuality benefits less from a statement of their differences than from an investigation of common grounds and shared objectives. Put simply, on-site museums and their online counterparts are merely two ways of exhibiting cultures. In this sense, “virtuality” is a fundamental exhibition practice.
The World Wide Web has become increasingly relevant to such core museum tasks as collecting, preserving, and exhibiting. The current digitization of objects in digital heritage programs has led to new forms of collections management and unparalleled access to replicas of museum artifacts. This transformation is changing museums as we know them and inspiring new forms of preserving and displaying cultures both on- and off-line. This article considers the diverse ways that museums are approaching virtuality today. A successful digital expansion will largely influence whether museums can sustain their cultural authority and position in the 21st century.
INTRODUCTION
Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is one of the great paintings of European art history. Housed in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, visitors can see it only in small groups, under tightly controlled conditions, including a limited time-slot and prior reservations. At least, that’s the theory. In real life the Last Supper has become a virtual painting, because few people ever really get to see it. You can visit the charming church of Santa Maria (and I did just that), but staff will tell you that you can make a reservation only by phone. If you call, the line is always busy. So there you are, in the middle of Milan, but da Vinci is as far away as ever. The air pollution we all generate has driven the painting into seclusion.
An ever-growing part of our cultural heritage is stored in museum archives and repositories, where visitors can neither see nor access it. Such collections are a hidden barrier to museums’ mission to “represent the world’s natural and cultural commonwealth” (as stated in the AAM Code of Ethics for Museums). In their efforts to preserve cultural heritage, museums are also placing it under lock and key. How often do visitors visit a museum to see a particular painting or artifact, only to find it not on display? In a library, at least, we can request to see and study the desired object; rarely is that possible in museums. But through the Web, a museum now has a way to provide public with access to its entire collection.
Digital heritage projects have reproduced large amounts of artifacts in collections databases. Despite such considerable efforts, few museums have fully embraced the diverse possibilities of having an unlimited space for display and communication. While other industries have expanded and reconfigured their business on the Web in recent years (or were forced to do so), museums have approached it with a mixture of caution and distance. In 1998, a survey of museums worldwide (by the Internet Museum) indicated how slowly museums ventured into online development: 53.7% indicated that they launched their Web sites in 1995 or after; 70% were spending less than $1,000 per year on the Web (not including personnel costs); and 57% had one-person Web departments. (See the bibliography for the URL for this survey and all the sites referred to in this article.)
However, The Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries, issued in May 2002 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), indicates that a rapid change has occurred in American museums. According to the report, all large museums in this country now have Web sites, followed by 93% of medium-sized and 41% of small museums. Fifteen percent of those without a Web site plan to add one in the coming year, and a majority of all American museums cited a need for additional funding (79%) and staff with greater expertise (63%) for their Web-based projects.
Many museum Web sites offer rudimentary information regarding location, hours, and services and general descriptions of collections. But are museums carrying their missions to the Web? It is the digitization of collections that dominates the digital profile of most museums (and the IMLS report shows that museums consider access to collections to be the main goal of digitization). Virtual collaborations with visitors or other museums, digital content development, handheld devices and wireless applications, distance learning, and interactive communication with online visitors may lead eventually to a broader role for museums. But that has not been achieved just yet. Despite heavy investments in digital heritage programs, museums still are struggling to find the connection between the “reality” of an artifact and its “virtual” representation.
Notions of virtuality usually have a technological basis. Digitization hereby refers to the transfer of existing information and the reproduction of physical objects in an electronic form. In such an understanding, virtual appears as the opposite of “real”. But do virtual reproductions simply mimic their real counterparts? I find that definition too restrictive; digitization is more than a reproduction technique. Etymologically speaking, virtuality comes from the Latin virtus, which has several meanings, including excellence, strength, power, and (in its plural form) mighty works. The word describes a modus of participation or potentiality. In this sense, virtual objects can be seen as illuminating the potential meanings of art and other objects. Virtual exhibitions and digital museum environments contextualize objects through narratives and links. Thus, virtuality should be understood as a complex cultural interpretation of objects that forces us to rethink the tangible and intangible imprints of our cultural history.
The present article is structured in four parts:
Virtuality. – The first part (I) explores the meaning of “virtuality” beyond a too narrow technological definition and illuminates it as a basic category of exhibiting practices of museums.
Reproduction. – Their online expansion clearly departs from being just an expansion: Online, museums function within a different, namely digital environment: The second part focuses on the reproduction of real objects into electronic representations through digital heritage projects.
Curating Online. – The usage of digital replicas beyond their mere conservation and archival functions can expand our understanding of exhibiting cultural artifacts. In the third part I suggest seven dimensions relevant to the development of online exhibitions.
Simulation. -The simulation of artifacts and experiences in virtual reality applications or installations goes beyond copying. The fourth part briefly outlines virtuality as a simulation of artifacts and their space.
VIRTUALITY IN ON-SITE MUSEUMS
Debates about whether museums are about objects or ideas seldom focus on the relevance of virtuality to the “museum experience.” As museums define themselves as showcases of material objects that visitors can experience on-location, the virtual display mode of the Web appears to be a distortion of this encounter. The most discussed museum endeavors in recent years – the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Tate Modern in London, the Jewish Museum in Berlin – all seem to underline the singular quality of space and spatial experience for an understanding of art and material culture. Many of our visitors see museums as civic spaces (and, at times, even sacred spaces), which speaks for the power of the museum as a physical site. That may contribute to the remarkable expectations that visitors have of museums-that they should present impartial and truthful voices. In a world where experiences are increasingly produced, translated, or shaped by media, the museum often seems to be the only place to find the “authentic.” But has the public chosen museums over schools, universities, and the media as the most trusted cultural institutions (as shown in the 1998 Rosensweig/Thelen study and the 2001 AAM survey) because they (mis)understand – or are (mis)lead – to understand the artifacts as such impartial material witnesses?
Artifacts may tell a story, but they do so within the curatorial and architectural framework created by the museum display. That is why “virtuality” is a fundamental exhibiting practice. The integration of objects into museum collections removes and alienates the object from its “authentic” (original, historical, physical, emotional) context and places it in a new and virtual “museum order.” New meanings are imposed on the artifact, ranging from its captions to its placement in the show. The artifact’s physical presence within its new curatorial context constitutes the “museum experience” that engages our visitors.
Of course, there is a difference between real objects displayed in an on-site museum and their virtual reproductions in an online environment. But the dichotomy between real and virtual is misleading and hides their commonalities, simplifying the multiple meanings objects acquire through cultural history.
Placing virtual reproductions on a Web site is similar to moving an object from its authentic context into the museum environment. Just as a museum collection redefines the value and meaning of a newly acquired artifact, the digital environment changes an object’s frame of reference once again. Museums have long been expert at framing objects in ever-new contexts, and the Web is just one of them.
The translation of museum objects into electronic representations renders both gains and losses. The much-praised social and civic space in which the object is experienced is lost. The digital reproduction appears foremost as visual (or aural) information, similar to a document. Although in galleries visitors experience the objects in a spatial order, they usually cannot touch the objects. Virtual programs eliminate the physical dimension altogether as well as the momentum created by the object’s physical presence; after all, bytes have no aura. But the digital copy can offer new venues for contextualizing the object and investigating its informational layers as well as interactive options for exploring its characteristics and history.
In recent years many museums have moved from object-centered to story-centered exhibitions, while still maintaining the importance of the real object experience. That is one reason museums rarely display reproductions. However, they often use technology and media to enhance the visitor experience. Lighting dramatizes the object’s presence; audio tours narrate its stories; and film and video introductions offer historical overviews. Careful installations identify all of these things as valuable exhibit components. Similarly, the object’s digital counterpart identifies it as an important part of our heritage; the quality of its presentation influences our comprehension; and virtual exhibitions and collection highlights recount its history. Because it is removed from a physical space, however, the digital experience might encourage a more rational reception of the artifact on display.
Today’s debates on virtuality recall those on art and reproduction technologies that took place in the first part of the 20th century. As early as 1934, philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: “[T]he technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” Benjamin’s dictum, that art looses its aura and immediacy of experience through the possibility of its mechanical reproduction (its reproducibility), was written during the newly emerging development of mass culture, (e.g. film), and at the time of radical attacks on ‘authentic art’ by artists themselves, as in Dada or Surrealism.
Benjamin’s influential thesis was much quoted in the debate of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction’ (1988), led by Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Stuart Hall. Praised by some for his sharp analysis of pre-modern art in a time of technological change, Benjamin is seen by others as a nostalgic apologist for a singular, elitist experience of art. “It’s worse when we insist-as Walter Benjamin insisted,” notes one critic “on the sacred ‘aura’ of the original. You must stand in front of the Mona Lisa or else. You can’t fall in love with her reproduction, no, no, no-that’s masturbation.” (Davis, 1991-95) But Benjamin wanted neither to go back in time nor to embrace technological progress for its own sake. Rather, he was exploring the impact of mass reproduction on our perception of art. The digitization of artifacts and their worldwide accessibility, via the Web, alters this perception once again. The transformation from the physical domain to the digital has blurred the distinction between authentic and virtual: They increasingly overlap.
VIRTUALITY AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
In the coming years, more and more museums will place digitized information on the Web. Digital heritage programs ensure integrated access to collections and materials held in memory institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives. They are guided by professional organizations around the world, including the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), Australian Museums On-line (AMOL), the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), and the Digital Heritage Initiative of the European Commission, among others. Library catalogue and database standards often have been used as models for these works-in-progress. The sheer volume of digitized collections that audiences will be able to access is unprecedented, and will lead to significant changes in how we look at, consume, and interpret cultural artifacts.
For example, in the mid-1990s, AMOL was developed as the main gateway to Australian museums and galleries. The portal is supported as a collaborative project by the country’s national and local governments and the museum sector. After several pilots, the Web site was launched in 1998; it now has collection descriptions of more than 400,000 objects and images from nearly 1,100 Australian museums. Recognized in 2002 Best of the Web competition as the best Museum’s Professional Site, AMOL has set standards for digital collaborations among museums and for digital outreach to both museum professionals and audiences. Its Web site also features discussion forums, online journals, news items, and stories about objects and collections.
In 1995, under the guidance of the French Ministry of Culture, the French museum database, Joconde, began to make collections accessible through digitized reproductions on the Web. In 2001, more than 132,000 images from 75 museum collections could be searched. And the number of users is growing, from 52,000 hits in 1999 to 335,000 in 2001. Similar national (and European Community-supported) digital heritage initiatives are underway in most other European countries, often supported by substantial funds. In early 2002, for example, the U.K. New Opportunities Fund announced the creation of a £50-million (approximately $73 million) fund for the digitization of Britain’s national heritage. This European subsidy system has its advantages. Smaller museums, which often lack resources for technology, benefit from national initiatives that support digitization and Web-site development and give them a place in national museum portals, central points for both museum professionals and audiences. But there is a downside to these national initiatives: they can inhibit museums from defining their own needs and unique visions.
In contrast, American museums have been forced to find funding for their own technological expansions, though many have received logistical help from the former Getty Information Institute and NINCH. In addition, the aforementioned IMLS report lists many examples of digitization efforts that led to regional and/or collection-based cooperation among museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies, including research, training, technical support, and shared databases open for public access. But on the whole American museums have had to develop and define their own institutional and programmatic goals for potential funders. (Naturally, smaller museums, having less branding power, have struggled to attract such funding). The digital profile that many American museums developed and the know-how for finding non-government sponsors for technology are rarely found in the European museum field. The effects of economic liberalization and changing governance models make this a pressing dilemma for many European museums.
REPRODUCTIONS, REPLICAS AND AUTHENTICITY
What is a reproduction and how can it help us to understand our culture? Does the fact that an original work of art is digitally reproducible enhance or diminish its value? Three brief examples may be helpful to illuminate these questions.
Reproduction is nearly as old as the artistic process and often has been accepted as an original craft or even an artistic act. Today’s conventional notion of its inferiority to the original work disregards cultural history. Much of what we know about Greek culture comes from Roman reproductions. And the 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance of Greek and Roman antiquity was guided by replicas of the Roman copies. Reproductions have long shaped our perceptions about the “classical age.” As such, the original Greek works represent only one, often undocumented layer of this history.
Early 20th-century art questioned the excessive value given to “original” art works. Duchamp’s “ready-mades”-mass-produced objects displayed as art-attacked traditional notions of “uniqueness” and “authenticity.” His radical gesture was emulated throughout 20th-century art by various artists. Nevertheless, “authenticity” survived, and the cultural industry adapted and exploited its notion of originality. Today, museums offer replicas of Duchamp’s ready-mades, produced in limited editions with his permission.
Finally, late 19th- and early 20th-century reproduction technologies, such as photography and film, were met initially with disdain, characterized as mechanical enterprises, mere forms of documentation or entertainment. But in time, they became art forms in their own right. Now technology has brought us yet another dilemma. Digital and digitized photography and film now surpass a polarized ‘original’ versus ‘copy’ categorization. Whereas analogue duplication still leads to a loss of a ‘generation’ (as one coined the quality loss within each reproduction cycle), digital reproductions of photography and film seem identical with the original: What is what? In the case of the digital copy, degradation exists only on a theoretical, imperceptible level. The lines between “originals” and “copies” have been blurred and partially eliminated.
Much of our current knowledge of cultural history is informed by a mix of original and reproduced works. The moment of intense encounter with a work of art or a historical artifact can have a long-lasting influence on our emotional curiosity and our quest for knowledge. But, often, love for art and culture is nurtured by reproductions: book and catalogue illustrations; postcards; posters, and now, thumbnails. Shouldn’t museums find ways to use both the precious original and its precious reproductions?
While the singularity and presence of the artifact fades in its duplication, most of its informational layers stay intact. Education and understanding of culture is based on this information and not exclusively on the emphatic experience of the objects’ presence. The object’s materiality is translated into a sequence of zeros and ones. This transfer permits digital-advanced investigations and tests. Art-historical comparative research is greatly enhanced by the accessibility of digital copies. It is not the quality of the reproduction that constitutes the challenge of digitization but its quantity. Museums might be able to ensure access to databases of thousands or millions of images, but how do they help their online visitors wade through such an overwhelming amount of data?
EXHIBITING CULTURES ONLINE
Like libraries, museums collect, preserve, and provide access. In addition, their mission requires that they interpret and exhibit the unique objects entrusted to them. Thus far, this aspect of the museum’s mission has not made its way to the Web. At least temporarily, digitization has changed the profile of museums from information interpreters to information providers. How can museums translate their curatorial expertise to the digital environment and encourage visitors to interact with artifacts online?
I would like to suggest seven features necessary for the development of online exhibitions: space, time, links, storytelling, interactivity, production values and accessibility. (For more on this topic, please see my article in the September/October 2002 issue of Museum News, “Going Global: Reaching Out for the Online Visitor.”)
Space: An online show creates a two-dimensional display (comparable to film or television). The social and physical experience of space is reduced to the intimate interaction between the user and the monitor. It is an intimate and partially isolated space (comparable to reading a book), but it allows access from any connected computer worldwide. Online exhibitions are no longer regional, but speak to a global audience. Digital advanced viewing can challenge and expand our perception of works of art. The virtual display removes objects from the referential frame of a traditional museum space. Virtual museum “spaces” can take on any shape they want, but they lack the conventional authority and emotion a museum building evokes.
Time: Online exhibitions are defined by the time that visitors need to access them. This is a technological notion of time, counted in seconds and bandwidth. But these sites only close when the server is down. Otherwise, visitors can come and go whenever they want, without communicating with staff or other visitors, or waiting until the ticket office opens. Within such a space, users easily loose track of time while surfing. However, Web time is easily organized according to the user’s individual needs: Visitors can engage for a limited time, interrupt and mark the virtual show for a later return. Similar to a book, they decide when to open the page.
Links: Surfing illuminates the language of the Web as a series of windows (or frames) and links. An online show speaks through a montage of images, sound, text, and design and the navigation of its pages. Although books have trained us to perceive information in a linear way, online exhibitions could lead to multilayered exhibition structures in on-site museums that combine textual and visual information or sound with moving images. But the Web is a nervous medium, a cabinet of wonders and curiosities. Everything is just a click away. A visit to a virtual space might not be as intentional as a visit to the physical museum, where visitors wander dutifully through the galleries, even if they are not enchanted. Web semiotics make for rapid decision making, and museums are challenged to make their voices heard within this new environment.
Storytelling: Of the thousands of digitized museum images in existence, only a small percentage of them are immediately compelling or engaging. Most digital reproductions only gain depth when they are presented as part of a larger story. Multimedia can lead to a diversity of voices in an exhibition, whether on site or online. Storytelling creates a sense of space the Web deeply needs.
Interactivity: The information age has increased our access to resources in an unprecedented way. In future years digital heritage programs will place hundreds of thousands of images and other data on the Web, altering our visual memory and cultural perception in unknown ways. The information age also has changed the way we acquire information. The more accessible the information, the less likely hierarchical communication is to make sense.
Online exhibitions must find ways of nurturing interactivity and facilitating access by including such options as nonlinear but transparent navigation of informational resources; behind-the-scenes examinations of curatorial work; and open communication via e-mail and guest books. Such increased access might lead to a change from the current emphasis on the composition and arrangement of artifacts to an open and interactive approach that permits visitors to become commentators, contributors, or even coproducers. Learning and interpretation would be enriched by such a dialogue between curators and visitors. Several recent collective memory sites provide interesting models for visitor interactivity. One of the most poignant examples is the September 11 Digital Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org), where visitors can search for information, write comments, and submit family photographs.
Production values: The development of data standards and the digitization of artifacts continue to be costly enterprises. Online exhibitions, however, can benefit from the groundwork that others have done. Online curators do not have to worry about shipping, installation, conservation, or insurance issues. Working with digitized information is cheaper, faster, and more flexible. And the low production costs of online shows make them good tools for small and large museums to re-define and innovate themselves.
Accessibility: Online accessibility of museum resources, either through exhibitions or collections, is the main incentive of digital heritage programs. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), part of the World Wide Web consortium, developed guidelines to ensure that online environments do not create limitations for people with disabilities. Braille interfaces, transcripts of audio and video content, consistent navigation mechanisms, and screen magnifiers are typical enhancements. Of course, a transparent design improves a Web site’s usability for all visitors.
SIMULATED SPACES, VIRTUAL REALITIES
Some objects and environments are too fragile for people to visit. Simulated spaces, ranging from simple online tours to virtual reality (VR) installations, can recreate cultural heritage artifacts that physical visits might jeopardize and/or destroy. VR installations engage the user through an array of interactive devices-gloves, headsets, motion detectors, animated images-in a computer-generated environment. Segments of virtual reality technology are already being used in many areas, such as entertainment, architecture, medicine, and engineering.
Just like film and theater, VR applications broaden the way we perceive the world. However, in an VR environment the visitor becomes part of the virtual world and can change it through his actions. VR allows a person to use her mind, eyes, and hands to enter a place she may have otherwise only visited in her imagination. A few mainstream museums have used VR applications, mostly as online tours of their on-site galleries. In children’s museums, however, VR is old news. Following the lead of their video-game trained visitors, many youth museums already have implemented VR applications into their shows.
VR also allows us to go to places that are off limits to visitors because they are being restored or renovated, or because they no longer exist. The recent (and disputed) restoration of the Giotto fresco cycle of 100 biblical scenes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, commissioned some 700 years ago, used the most advanced techniques. But now only 25 people at a time can visit the fresco, and each group is allowed no more than 15 minutes. Although the entire chapel was scanned during the approximately $1.8-million restoration, the digitized images have not been used-with the exception of an online panorama-to offset the limitations placed on visitors. Like the Scrovegni Chapel, other sites face the dangers of pollution and temperature fluctuations caused by visitors. The cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, the latter “commissioned’ approximately 31,000 years ago, can tolerate only virtual visits. Only scientists are allowed to study the actual caves and must follow strict protocols.
Online panoramas and tours are, of course, very rudimentary forms of simulation. Archeological excavation sites like the Belgian Ename open-air museum use digital imagery to visualize a Benedictine abbey that dominated life in the Flemish Ardennes from 1063 to 1795. On-site kiosks transmit virtual reconstructions of the successive structures that stood on the spot and superimpose them on the excavated foundations. Thus a visit to the open-air museum becomes a time travel, enabling visitors to envision how the original structures appeared. Of course, turning to simulated spaces may blur the lines between museums and theme parks and speed up the “Disneyfication of culture”. This largely depends on the level of historical research and accuracy used for such simulations. But the desire to attract greater public support and visitation is already encouraging archeological sites, and some museums, to use virtual reconstruction as one tool.
THINKING ABOUT MUSEUMS FROM A NET PERSPECTIVE
Whereas in the above chapters Virtuality is discussed from a museum perspective and appears as an expansion of classical museum functions and objectives into the net, it can be explored from a different perspective, that of the net. Can the digital transformation lead to new forms of museology and new relationships between museums and their visitors? There are many open questions and good reasons to speculate.
A museum defines itself through its collection. But once information about that collection is transferred into a database, does it matter where the database originates or is accessed? How important is museum identity in a digital world, and how can it be sustained? Furthermore, although the ownership of intellectual property on the Internet is still being debated, it seems clear that many Web users do not concern themselves with the provenance of their downloads. What does this mean for museums?
From a net perspective, many of our habitual definitions no longer are self-evident. Museums no longer necessarily are buildings. With the DCS/ Digital Cellular System or the GSM/Global System for Mobile Communications, they could be readable landscapes – a status currently being planned by the Identity Factory Southeast in the South of the Netherlands. Standing in the middle of a Dutch landscape, we may learn about its often invisible historical layers through artifacts that once came from this landscape, but in time were taken out of context and placed in diverse museum collections. Now, we at least can see their digital replicas close to their original “home”.
Wireless applications will change our perceptions of museums as restricted spaces and return artifacts (in their digitized version) to their ‘authentic’ provenance. The Nuovo Museo Elettronico (NUME) in Bologna has turned the old part of the city into a virtual museum by developing a three-dimensional historical model that allows a visitor to walk through 1,000 years of Bologna’s history. In both projects, visitors do not go to an actual museum, but they visit an environment that becomes readable, through a PAD device, a Web site, or a virtual theater. However, it is too early to know whether this and other similar experiments will lead to successful hybrid spaces in museums that allow visitors to move between real and virtual sensory experiences. It might very well be that they share the limited success of earlier 3-d experiments such as stereoscopic photography, 3-D movies or holographic images.
Does virtual cooperation between museums alter the notion of a traditional museum space? “Crossfade,” a curated virtual space exploring sound as an artistic medium, was developed through the virtual cooperation of four institutions: the Goethe-Institute in San Francisco; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Accessible through the Web sites of all four partner institutions, the work-in-progress has developed its own identity. Once a user bookmarks it as a favorite, “Crossfade” departs from its institutional origins. How can a museum define its space in a digital environment without becoming fragmented or transitory? How often do we “find things” on the Net and then cannot remember where we first saw them?
While established museums are moving cautiously to the Net, new museums often are going the other way and starting their initiatives with a Web site. The Gay Museum and the International Museum of Women are just two examples; both institutions challenge our ideas of how to develop a museum and its audience. It is still too early to predict if exclusively virtual museums will be successful. In fact, there are no standards for measuring success in a digital environment, although research into online visitors and evaluations of their experiences are the focus of the “What Clicks?” study of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a two-year survey by Soren/Lemelin, among others.
Less than ten years ago most of us did not have e-mail. Less than five years ago most museums did not have a Website. Both now are seen as essential and integral tools for museums. Increasingly, contemporary life is being characterized by a merger of the real and the virtual. The digital transformation of museums is challenging traditional ideas about what they are about. Digital objects, online visitors, and virtual communication are redefining the museum, both online and on site. I predict that museums will continue to reinvent themselves in the virtual world, to ensure that they fulfill their mission to help people explore culture, memory and identity in the 21st century.
REFERENCES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bandelli, Andrea: Virtual Spaces and Museums. In: Journal of Museum Education, Volume 24, numbers 1 and 2, 1999, “The museum as a public space, pg. 20.
Jean Baudrillard, Stuart Hall, Paul Virilio: ” The Work of Art in the Electronic Age”, Block, No.14, 1988, pp.3-14 (Interview from La Sept (Société d’édition de programme de Television) television program “L’objet de l’art à l’âge électronique”, May 8, 1987).
Walter Benjamin: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York 1969.
Bowen, Jonathan: Virtual Visits to virtual museums. In: Museums and the Web, Toronto, April 1998.
Bronner, Stephen: Reclaiming the Fragments: On the Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin.
Castells, Manuel: The Internet Galaxy. Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford 2001.
MacDonald, George /Alsford, Stephen: The Digital Museum. In: The Wired Museum. Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, Washington: American Association of Museums, 1997.
Davis, Ben: Digital Museums. In: Aperture Magazine, Fall, 1994.
Davis, Douglas: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995)”, Leonardo, Vol.28, No. 5, 1995, pp. 381-386.
Himanen, Pekka: The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York 2001.
Johnson, Steven: Interface Culture. San Francisco 1977.
Kenderdine, Sarah: Inside the meta-center: a wonder cabinet. June 1998.
Mannoni, Bruno: Bringing Museums On Line. In: Communications of the ACM, June 1996.
Schlesinger, Marissa: Digital Information and the Future of Museums. In: Spectra 24.4. (1997), 17-20.
Schweibenz, Werner: The “Virtual Museum”: New Perspectives For Museums to Present Objects and Information Using the Internet as a Knowledge Base and Communication System. 1998.
MUSEUM WEBSITES
Cave paintings of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc
Cave paintings of Lascaux
Crossfade
Ename Project
The Identity Factory Southeast
International Museum of Gay and Lesbian History
International Museum of Women
Nuovo Museo Elettronico
Scrovegni Chapel and http://www.giottoagliscrovegni.it/ita/visita/mappa_a.htm
September 11 Digital Archive
DIGITAL HERITAGE PROGRAMS AND PORTALS
Archives & Museum Informatics (Many papers from the ‘Museum and the Web’ conferences since 1997 are online and rich resources)
Australian Museums & Galleries Online
Best of the Web 2002 awards, Museum and the Web 2002
Canadian Heritage Information Network
European Commission Digital Heritage Information Society
Former Getty Information Institute
Joconde Database
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
Sumption, Kevin: Meta-centers: do they work and what might the future hold. A case study of Australian Museums On-Line. 2000
SURVEYS AND EVALUATIONS
Douma, Michael: Lessons learned from WebExhibits.org: Practical suggestions for good design. Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2000: Papers
Eduweb Survey on education websites
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS): Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries 2002 Report
Kravchyna, Victoria and Sam Hastings: Informational Value of Museum Web Sites. First Monday, volume 7, number 2, February 2002
Minneapolis Institute of Arts “What Clicks?”
Rosenzweig, Roy and David Thelen: The presence of the past. Popular uses of the history in American life. Columbia University Press 1998
Soren, B. J., & Lemelin, N. (2002). Cyberpals: A look at on-line museum visitor experiences. Unpublished manuscript, The Imperial Oil Centre for Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, OISE/UT, University of Toronto.
Internet Museum, The World Wide Museum Survey on the Web
ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES
Guidelines Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE ARTICLE
Klaus Mueller: Museums and Virtuality. In: Curator. The Museums Journal. Vol. 45, No. 1, 2002
This article has been reprinted in: Ross Parry (ed.) Museums in a Digital Age. Leicester Readers in Museum Studies (Abingdon and New York: Routledge: 2010).