Ongoing collection activities ensure that museums retain their relevance and develop their art-historical perspective. But this activity is accompanied by a constant need for more space to accommodate the growing collection.
Museums are often called on to maintain a status quo, while at the same time being required to ensure their ongoing development and expansion.
Over the past 200 years, museums have been in a process of continual development. The most significant change the institution has undergone, however, has been brought about by visitors.
Today’s museum-goers are not only greater in number but also more diverse. Whereas the museum public used to be largely homogeneous in nature, today it is a multifaceted group with varied expectations and levels of knowledge ‒ and that is to be regarded as a great success.
To offer every member of the public a satisfactory experience of art, a collection must have at its disposal a broad range of interpretation and display techniques that cater for different levels of knowledge and interests and form the point of departure for individualised museum education.
This is essential for making a museum visit an exhilarating experience and ensuring that visitors will come back again and again. As a result, a museum is not just a place, but also a function – a responsibility towards society.
The space in which the “museum” takes place is by no means defined merely by the physical perimeters of the building. The museum must take place far beyond the boundaries of its structural facilities and make itself felt as a primary authority and mediator of the visual arts and culture throughout the regional structure that surrounds and supports it.
Museums must become active and carry out educational efforts in schools, nurseries, youth centres, higher education institutions, hospitals, retirement homes, and in the public realm in general.
Yet museums should also play an important role as central institutions for education and mediation in the digital realm. In this context, they must link digital technologies with their collection, research, preservation and education activities, and offer new forms of narration.
With the means provided by the digital age, they must develop an alternative form of access in parallel to the physical site.
Here the aim should by no means be to build a virtual museum in the digital realm – such endeavours are not only poor imitations of reality, but also make inadequate use of the narrative possibilities offered by digital media.
On the contrary, the institutions that will succeed will be those that prove capable of providing a coherent programme of individualised narration and multimedia presentation of cultural contents above and beyond the issues of cataloguing and digitisation that face all collections today.
What is important is how the narration and access are developed. Our yardstick must be to offer a complex, multimedia-based, decentralised and diversified educational programme that takes place independently of the physical visit and is adaptable to individual needs.
The citizen’s museum of the digital age should be accessible to everyone, regardless of geographical location. The construction of this institution in the digital realm and the question of which platforms will prove to be fundamental worldwide will depend on creativeness and ambition, but also on funding.
