Response to Chapter 18-New Media

New media is a term that applies to a wide range of technical medium including installation art, information kiosks, hand held information devices, museum archiving systems, blogs, websites, and podcasts. New media can be useful to museums in helping to create new ways of accessing and exhibiting collections, but it can also present new sets of problems. Of primary concern to the author of Chapter 18 is the issue of how museums can reconcile new media with traditional ways of organizing knowledge. Rather than thinking of new media as something that requires new modes of thinking, and new organizational structures, it would be helpful to think of new media as a supplement or analogue to traditional museum ideas. To do this effectively a museum must carefully consider how new media can be used to further the museum’s mission, and the resulting benefits and problems that are a consequence of implementing new media strategies.

A museum should first consider new media that is easier to implement and could give measurable results concerning their success or failure. For example, a website is relatively easy to implement and could provide several benefits to a museum such as informing the public about current exhibits, and giving directions and hours to the museum. A website could also be used to create a virtual museum that would give access to objects to people who might not otherwise be able to physically visit the museum. The website could further be expanded to include blogs and downloadable audio or video podcasts that could give information on exhibits, as well as lectures on related topics. A blogging feature could help create a dialogue between museum goers and museum professionals and may help the museum develop further ideas and better serve its audience.

New media also includes technologies that can be used within the museum as an adjunct to traditional exhibits. These technologies include hand held informational devices and informational kiosks. However, these types of new media may or may not be useful depending on both the ways in which museums implement them, and the degree to which museum goers actually use the devices. A major disadvantage to kiosks and hand held devices are the high cost. Finding corporate sponsors can reduce some of this cost, but a museum may prefer not to do this. An advantage to using kiosks and held devices is that they may allow the user to delve further into the collections than is possible through exhibitions, and thus be able to more fully exploit the resources of the museum.

When dealing with digital information museums are faced with two problems: storage space for the information and changes in file type in the future. The author discusses the problem of storage space in Chapter 18, however, I do not believe that it is as much of a problem as it would lead one to believe. Although the amount of digital information that a museum has to deal with is increasing, the storage capacity of computers and servers are increasing as well and storage space is probably not the biggest issue that museum should be concerned about with digital information. A much bigger problem, and one that is not discussed in the text, is possible changes to file types in the future. For example, while the jpeg may be the standard photo file type presently, this is bound to change sometime in the future. To prevent a museum’s collection of digital information from becoming obsolete the museum will have to be active in preserving and updating its digital collection. This pragmatic concern should underlie decisions that a museum makes in how it stores and handles digital information.