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On February 1, 2011, Google launched its much-heralded Art Project in partnership with 17 museums from Europe and the U.S. Despite the limited content and a long wish-list of enhancements, the Google Art Project offers a glimpse of innovative new ways for museums to use and be used on the Web, collaboratively.

This chapter retraces the history and kinds of mobile technologies used in museums, and explores some of the new mobile experiences and applications now possible using the latest generation of mobile and related technologies such as location‐aware systems, computer vision, and augmented reality. In the process, it examines models for understanding the role of the museum in a multiplatform environment and suggests that the museum's relationship to global audiences should evolve to reflect the distributed network structure of the Internet itself. Drawing on Judith Mastai's feminist critique of museum visitor services models, as well as the work of artist Halsey Burgund, Proctor proposes the use of crowdsourcing in mobile applications as one route to greater relevance and sustainability for both mobile applications and the museum's mission.

“Crowdsourcing” is a practice that combines the concepts of “the crowd” and “outsourcing.” Introducing two articles on crowdsourcing in this issue, Nancy Proctor argues that—although we associate crowdsourcing with Web 2.0 and the social media revolution—its origins stretch back to the nineteenth century. Crowdsourcing is examined for its usefulness in creating radical new relationships between museum constituents, users, and institutions—putting the “wisdom of the crowd” in dialogue rather than in competition with formal institutional knowledge.

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