Page 201 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Practice not theory: a new art museum in the digital ageRich Cherry, @richcherryJohn Cotton Dana said in The New Museumin 1917: “The new museum...does not build on an educational superstition. It examines its community’s life first, and then straightway bends its energies to supplying some the materi- al which that community needs, and to making that material’s presence widely known, and to presenting it in such a way as to secure it for the maximum of use and the maximum efficiency of that use.”1 If we take that suggestion to heart, and bring forth a new art museum into today’s digital culture, into today’s always on – always connected community that has rapidly adopted digital, mobile and social media tools, what are the things we need to consider?Digital in museum is not new. In 1967, an informal grouping of museums in the New York City area established the Museum Computer Network (MCN) with the goal of automating their registration records.2 Nonetheless, the Internet’s coming of age in the 1990s and thesocial media and mobile revolutions of the 2000’s, and the adoption of both by the general public has driven its adoption in museums. Museums that already existed had to retrofit the infrastructure necessary to support this rapid expansion of digital since museums built during the last century had hardly taken this kind of expansion into account. Older buildings make it hard to add the digital infrastructure and pre-existing staffing structures make it hard to add the staffing.What about new museums opening now or museums expanding or restructuring? What considerations when planning buildingsand new staffs should be made? As Graham Black notes in Transforming Museums in the Twenty-First Century: “We are living through a period of profound change in Western society, underpinned by a rise in new media and a fundamental shift in Western economies to a globally interconnected information economy.”3