No abstract

No abstract

The museum world is rapidly changing from being collection-centred to being community-centred and for the public. Apart from broadening access to collections through, for example, digitisation initiatives, new ways of involving the public more meaningfully and at various levels have emerged. Experiences inside museums have become more engaging, by extending the experience beyond the physical visit, or by involving the public in various forms of crowdsourced stewardship of collections. In this book, we explore the design implications that go along with these developments, all concerned with diversifying and making the engagement of the public in museum experiences more rewarding. We focus on the design implications associated with museums reaching out to crowds beyond their local communities, on experimenting with novel technologies and on conceiving experiences embedded in connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. By looking at and reflecting on trends, we attempt to sketch a picture of how future museums will change and, particularly, how they will relate to their public as a result of responding to or embracing these trends.

The article focuses on a study of knowledge creation and organizing in a local history wiki. The background for this study was to understand how web 2.0 and social media might open new possibilities for museums to collaborate with communities and lay professionals in cultural heritage knowledge creation. Digital technologies provide tools that in many ways overcome challenges of physical collaboration between museums and amateurs. But technologies also bring in new aspects of ordering, categorizing and systematizing knowledge that illuminates the different institutional as well as professional frameworks that writing local historical knowledge into digital forms in fact represents.