Museum informatics is an interdisciplinary field of study that refers to the theory and application of informatics by museums. It represents a convergence of culture, digital technology, and information science. In the context of the digital age facilitating growing commonalities across museums, libraries and archives, its place in academe has grown substantially and also has connections with digital humanities. In all ages, museums are responsible for obtaining, storing, and exhibiting objects of different kinds of objects from art, cultural heritage, natural history, science, to technological inventions. However, modern museums are not only repositories of objects; they are repositories of knowledge. They are more like an information service organization, store information and share knowledge. After years of studies, the museum professionals and visitors have found their understanding of roles museums play largely changed by the introduction of new information technologies in museums. Today's visitors to museums expect instant access to a large amount of information about every object in the museum's collections. As the needs and expectations change, the users of museum information resources are galvanizing museums to make appropriate changes. Besides, museum researchers and professionals have begun to explore the impact of information science and technology on the people who use museum resources.
Overview Museum informatics is an emerging field of academic study focused on the intersection between information technologies, museums and their staff members, and online museum data and services. The more general cultural informatics deals with, for example, information design and interaction, digital curation, cultural heritage description and access, social media, and the application of digital tools. Museums have embraced the application of museum informatics, which has been supported by US federal grants and in particular, by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The older term "museum studies" refers more to traditional curatorial perspectives rather than relating to the use of information science and information technology.
Archives and Museum Informatics is a leading journal in the field of museum informatics. University courses relating to museology include a component on museum informatics. The Museum Computer Network (MCN) in the United States holds an annual conference and runs the MCN-L electronic mailing list. The Museums Computer Group (MCG) in the United Kingdom also holds meetings relevant to museum informatics. The ICHIM conference series in Europe and the Museums and the Web conference series in North America cover aspects of museum informatics. Other relevant conferences include the EVA Conferences. Books are available on the subject. There have been a number of collaborative projects in the field of museum informatics such as The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), Artstor, the Museum Informatics Project (MIP), and steve.museum. The International Council of Museums (ICOM), through Cary Karp, was instrumental in initiating the ".museum" top-level domain for museums on the Internet. Companies such as Archives & Museum Informatics in Canada and Cogapp in the United Kingdom help museums in using information technology effectively.
History
The earliest references to museum informatics in English are from Archives and Museum Informatics a newsletter and journal published on the subject from 1987 to 1996. In the early 1990s, museum informatics projects and services developed at numerous American universities. Cultural informatics was introduced into library and information science education in 2000 at the Pratt Institute School of Library and Information Science in New York. Graduate classes on the topic of museum informatics were offered at the University of Illinois starting in Fall 2001, and at Florida State University starting in Spring 2003. Ph.D. theses were using "museum informatics" in the title by 2002 and 2004. A comprehensive literature review of museum informatics was published in 2005 by Paul F. Marty, W. Boyd Rayward, and Michael B. Twidale, and in 2007, an academic reader, Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums, edited by Paul F. Marty and Katherine Burton Jones, was published as part of the Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science. For the past few decades, we have witnessed unprecedented changes with respect to the use of museum information resources. The changes have resulted in new levels of information sharing, accessing and new forms of interactions between museum professionals and visitors. These changes have manifested most clearly in the relationships between museums, museum websites, and museum visitors. Museums are at a turning point in history, as a ‘technology-driven mutation’ in the evolution of ‘cultural heritage institutions’ is going to redefine the domain and blur boundaries for museum institutions. The future of museums is beginning to be shaped by computer scientists who are serving for the museum missions in the recent tradition of museum operation. What's more, the introduction of new information resources and technologies in museums has considerably changed the understanding of the role of museums for museum visitors.
Resources
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
