How Does Technology Enhance The Future Prospects Of Museums?

You were involved for several years as a committee member in the Museum Computer Group, a group interested in the relationship between the museums and digital technologies. In what ways, do you feel that digital technologies can further develop to enhance the future prospects of Museums?
The Museum Computer Group is an open and interesting group. I was involved in a couple of their conferences and some of their meetings and it was really interesting. What I found quite frustrating, quite difficult it is that they think that (and I think that this is in general) digital technologies must come first. In my approach and my research which is a bit political in some respect, I stress that digital technologies shouldn’t be considered a tool to better
I wrote that museums shouldn’t be a starting point. I think the research start should be the museum visitors, the user-centred design. Often, due to the lack of money people forget to evaluate the museum experience when is on the go. The evaluation is done when people just finish the visit, instead of having this form of evaluation when the visitor interacts with the exhibition. I think that the visitor experience evaluation should be done during the experience to understand better what happen to the human rather than the piece of technology itself.

The transformative process of change for me is that knowledge process. It is us changing a lot from the way we understand the information. It is what we remember later (or chase it through the phone) as it becomes a different story than that experience of the museum itself. The question is: ‘It wouldn’t be that the same it was before?’ I consider that it is always important to come back (it was not the same the case with paintings?) and think about it. We have much multisensory aspect in the exhibitions and the learning process is different. Did people do the same processes before when they look at it, and did they go back and reflect about
Digitising all the collection and having them online is one of the important aspects of digital technologies in museums because it relates very much on how (and not the fact that you have access on it and you can do it online) this collection will be transmitted to the next generation. Digitization extends museum beyond the walls. Museum become something further than the space itself. Through the use of technology museum become more fluid, more broaden, more liquid than we use to know it. I remember reading things about British Museum about the digitization of their collection. The thing that they would say to you is the normal ‘It enhance participation, engagement, different function of learning, they will say keywords that everyone talks about such as empowerment, visitors’ voices in museum is stronger’. I think that there is truth within all of them.

When talking about the digitization of collection and participation I observed that there is a lot of writing and discussions about The British Museum. The museum takes a lot of material from Africa or other places and they digitize it online, but they lack of bringing people from these countries who those objects belong, to support the process of understanding the objects.
Again, the voice of the museum is very powerful. I think that there is lack of engaging local communities who these artefacts