Museums on the Web: Exploring the past for the future

Abstract

Museums on the Web: Exploring the past for the future Chairs: Karin de Wild Nadezhda Povroznik This panel will shed light on the histories of museums on the Web. The advent of on-line technologies has changed the way museums manage collections and access them, shape exhibitions, and build communities and participation. Aspects can be found in histories about museums and digital technologies (see for). However, scant attention has been given to how museums' online presence has developed over time, from the mid-1990s to the present. This panel will present different perspectives in the history of museums on the Web. What can we learn from the pioneering virtual museums and online exhibitions? How did (information) architecture and museums websites develop over time? And how have online collections been built, circulated, and made accessible? Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, museums enhanced their digital activities and the importance of the Web to engage with audiences was felt throughout the sector. Furthermore, in today's fast-changing digital landscape, museums are facing new challenges such as the rise of AI and the semantic Web. By engaging with the past, we can enhance our understanding of how museums are functioning today and offer new perspectives for future developments. Therefore, this panel will explore the past, but with an eye on the future.

Full text

1 sciencesconf.org:resaw2023:432963
Museums on the Web: Exploring the past for the future
Karin De Wild1, Nadezhda Povroznik2, Giuliano Gaia3, Stefania Boiano, Jonathan Bowen4, Ann Borda5, Mette
Skov6, and Tiancheng Leo Cao7
1University of Leiden – Netherlands
2Technische Universität Darmstadt – Germany
3IULM University – Italy
4London South Bank University – United Kingdom
5University of Melbourne – Australia
6Aalborg University – Denmark
7University of Texas at Austin – United States
Abstract
Museums on the Web: Exploring the past for the future
Chairs:
Karin de Wild
Nadezhda Povroznik
This panel sheds light on the histories of museums on the Web. The advent of online technologies has
changed the way museums manage collections and access them, shape exhibitions, and build
communities and participation. Aspects can be found in histories about museums and digital
technologies (see for example Parry, 2007; 2009; Cameron, 2003; Cameron & Kenderdine, 2010;
Bowen, 2010). However, scant attention has been given to how museums’ online presence has
developed over time, from the mid-1990s to the present. This panel presents different perspectives in
the history of museums on the Web. What can we learn from the pioneering virtual museums and
online exhibitions? How did (information) architecture and museums websites develop over time?
And how have online collections been built, circulated, and made accessible?
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, museums enhanced their digital activities and the importance of the
Web to engage with audiences was felt throughout the sector. Furthermore, in today’s fast-changing
digital landscape, museums are facing new challenges such as the rise of AI and the semantic Web.
By engaging with the past, we can enhance our understanding of how museums are functioning today
and offer new perspectives for future developments. Therefore, this panel explores the past, but with
an eye on the future.
This panel coincides with the release of a Double Special Issue “Museums on the Web” in the journal
Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Taylor & Francis).
Keywords: Virtual museums, online exhibitions, digital collections, information architecture

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Early Virtual Science Museums: Case Studies and Conclusions
Giuliano Gaia
Stefania Boiano
Jonathan P. Bowen
Ann Borda
We discuss three case studies of early science museum-related websites in the 1990s and early 2000s
(Bowen et al., 2005). The Virtual Museum of Computing (VMoC) was a completely virtual museum,
originally produced in 1995 as part of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an international
online museum directory within the WWW Virtual Library (Bowen, 1995), and later adopted by the
International Council of Museums (ICOM). This experiment demonstrated the speed with which a
virtual museum could be established (Bowen, 2010). It included virtual galleries, most notably on the
computing pioneer Alan Turing (1912–1954) by his biographer Andrew Hodges. The virtual museum
was mirrored around the world as part of the VLmp project.
The Science Museum in London was one of the first museums in the United Kingdom to have its own
web server, second only to the Natural History Museum next to it (Gaia et al., 2020). The Science
Museum hosted an early meeting on web service provision by and for museums, concurrently with an
exhibition on the “Information Superhighway” at the museum in 1995 (Bowen et al., 2005). Exhiblets
were launched online in 1998 and they were considered the first virtual exhibition on the museum
website that was not connected to a physical space or exhibition at the museum (Ellis & Borda 2004)
Exhiblets were a low-technology enhancement to the website and were intended to be widely
accessible for the public and school students. The name Exhiblet was a combination of “exhibition”
and “Java Applet”. Ingenious was a multi-site digital collections transformation project, launched as a
website in 2003 (Borda & Bud, 2003) and archived in 2017 with The National Archives of the UK
(Gaia et al., 2020). It made publicly accessible 30,000 digitized images together with related records
sourced from the museum, the Science and Society Picture Library, and other related museums, with
topical stories informed by the Exhiblets development and toolkits for users to build on their
experience, by tagging and sharing object images (Borda & Beler, 2003).
Virtual Leonardo and Leonardo’s Ideal City were two experiments conducted by the digital team of
the Science and Technology Museum of Milan, between 1999 and 2001. The experiment consisted of
the creation of a shared online 3D world, namely a reconstruction of the real museum in the first case
and a completely imaginary world in the second case. The projects were based on an innovative
platform developed by the Polytechnic University of Milan working on VRML, Java, and Java3D.
Although there were technological issues, the platform offered many advanced features, such as:
virtual guided tours, actionable machines, interaction between avatars, automated avatars, etc., well
before Second Life.
We describe the above three case studies from the early World Wide Web and then draw some
general conclusions, from first-hand experience of developments at the time. We cover both the
advantages and the challenges encountered by the various projects and illustrate why they did not
necessarily become established, despite promising early results. At that time, web information
provision was relatively simplistic, although changing fast (Gaia et al., 2020). We are now at a new
expansion point in the web with the metaverse and Web3. We consider some possible future advances
with the hindsight of early web experiences.

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A Diachronic Analysis of Danish Museum Websites
Mette Skov
Tanja Svarre
Having an online presence in the form of a website is mandatory for most museums. However,
whereas the development and use of digital technologies within the physical museum have received
much attention, less attention has been devoted to understanding the role and development of museum
websites. Overall, the present study aims to provide an overview of the development of Danish
museum websites across the domain and through a fifteen-year period. The main research question is:
What characterizes the development of Danish museum websites through the years 2005–2020?
The methodological approach is a diachronic analysis of Danish museum websites. It is a historical
study, building on a sample from the Danish Internet Archive. Similar to Chakraborty and Nanni
(2017), we use archived websites as a primary source to trace and describe the development of
museums’ online presence. The sample includes representations of all state-owned and state-approved
museum websites including the years 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020 (counting 147 museums in 2005,
reduced to 102 museums in 2020). The sample includes representations of the hidden web strata
(Brügger, 2018) in the form of text files (written text from the websites) and metadata files with
information about date, title, URL, document type, etc.
The analysis is mainly quantitative and consists of two parts. The first part uses descriptive statistics
to explain the characteristics of Danish museum websites and their development through the years
2005–2020 regarding development in size, document types etc. across museum categories (art
museums, cultural and natural history museums). The second part of the analysis uses text analytics,
first to analyze the development of terms used in the period, and then to identify clusters of different
categories of museum websites by using k-means clustering (Jain, 2010).
The characteristics identified in the first part of the analysis and an earlier categorization of museum
websites (Schweibenz, 2004) serve as a starting point for the cluster analysis aiming to establish
categories of archetypal museum websites on the basis of term occurrences. Have Danish museum
websites transformed from ‘information leaflets’ to destinations in their own right, or what is the
case?
Qualitative selected examples from the data set serve to illustrate and further elaborate the quantitative
analysis. Finally, the article discusses the methodological challenges and shortcomings of using
archived web materials to describe the development of a domain.

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Rethinking Openness: A Social Constructivist Approach to the Promises of the New Museology
Tiancheng Leo Cao
From the early adoption of open-source collection management software to recent open-access
projects emphasizing public participation, the integration of digital technologies in museums has been
accompanied by a parallel transformation of how museum professionals conceptualize and
operationalize the notion of openness in practice. The Covid-19 pandemic foregrounded the
importance of digital technologies for museums, which struggled to remain open online and keep
audiences engaged during the global shutdown. This study examines how the understanding of
openness has changed among museum professionals in recent decades and what it means for the
museum community in a post-pandemic world.
Taking a social constructivist approach to understand the use of digital technologies in the museum
context, this study adopts the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) as a conceptual and
analytical framework to examine the changing attitudes and practices among museum scholars and
practitioners. The SCOT framework highlights the roles of relevant social groups, especially how they
attach different meanings to the same artifact creating an interpretative flexibility and how power
relationships lead to the dominance of a particular interpretation resulting in a stabilization of the
meaning of the artifact (Pinch & Bijker, 2012; Lievrouw, 2010). Importantly, SCOT also emphasizes
how deeply institutionalized social values may shape the practices of individual actors (Klein &
Kleinman, 2002).
In the museum context, one such set of social values is the New Museology, a theoretical movement
seeking to redefine the role of museums in society and their evolving relationships with the public. It
prescribes a fundamental shift in focus from collection care to public service (Vergo, 1989; Stam,
1993; Hooper-Greenhill, 2000). Considering this reorientation “from being about something to being
for somebody” (Weil, 1999), one might expect that openness in museums might have undergone a
similar transformation. This study establishes a connection between the two distinct bodies of
literature by providing empirical evidence regarding this museological transformation.
Methodologically, this study investigates the archive of the Museums and the Web (MW) conference
and has identified 36 conference papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of
openness. Informed by the SCOT framework and using a combination of open and axial coding
(Corbin & Strauss, 2015), this study performs a qualitative content analysis based on the following
template: Through open (practices), the (projects) allow museums to achieve (goals) to serve (relevant
social groups), if (challenges) can be overcome. Through this analysis, this study seeks to identify the
primary actors in the adoption of open-related practices, explain how these groups have endowed
openness with different meanings, and understand whether this interpretive flexibility has led to an
epistemological and operational stabilization. Importantly, MW’s historical archive allows this study
to probe the changing institutional and social contexts in which open-related practices were adopted
and therefore to understand how openness has changed in the museum community in the past thirty
years. This study contributes by reconsidering a concept that is instrumental to the museums’
increasing adoption of digital technologies and their expanding presence on the web.

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Short Biographies
Chairs:
Dr. Karin de Wild is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary Museum and Collection Studies at
Leiden University. Her research interests are on digital heritage, arts and cultures. She is a board
member of the Henri van der Waal Foundation (international research network for digital art history
and image studies) and a member of WARCnet (the European Research network for Web ARChive
studies). Before joining Leiden University, she was a digital fellow at the School of Museum Studies,
University of Leicester. In her past life as curator and researcher, she collaborated with a wide range
of private collections and museums including SFMoMA, de Young Museum, Victoria and Albert
Museum and Rhizome.
Dr. Nadezhda Povroznik is a Research Associate at the Institute for History in the Technische
Universität Darmstadt, with more than 15 years of experience in the Digital Humanities field, with a
focus on Digital History, Digital Heritage, and Virtual Museology. She is a member of the Editorial
Board of the Journal of Digital History and a guest editor of the Journal Internet Histories. She is a
Co-chair and Representative at the International Executive Council of the CenterNet, the constituent
organisation within the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organisation. She was a Visiting Researcher
at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg
(2019–2022). Her research delves into the history of museums on the web and their evolving role in
the digital age. She also publishes widely on digital methods and their application in history and the
humanities. In 2022, she published a book on the Web History of Society and Social Institutions.
Panelists:
Prof. Jonathan P. Bowen, MA Oxon, FBCS, FRSA, is Emeritus Professor of Computing at London
South Bank University and Chair of Museophile Limited, a museum and IT consultancy company that
he founded in 2002. He has been a visiting scholar/professor at a variety of institutions including the
Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), King’s College London, the Pratt Institute (New
York), and Southwest University (Chongqing, China). Previously he has held academic/research posts
at Birmingham City University, University of Reading, Oxford University Computing Laboratory,
and Imperial College London. Jonathan’s research interests range from computer science, especially
software engineering, through to the history of computing, museum informatics, and digital culture.
He contributes to Wikipedia on cultural and computing-related topics. In 2017, he co-authored The
Turing Guide on the computing pioneer Alan Turing and, in 2019, he co-edited the book Museums
and Digital Culture. www.jpbowen.com
Dr Ann Borda is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Health Policy at the University of
Melbourne, Australia. She has a doctorate in informatics from University College London (UCL). She
is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital
Health. Ann is an interdisciplinary academic. Her research interests include citizen science, smart
cities and digital culture, living lab methods, digital society, and ethical futures. In Australia, Ann has
held positions as CEO of the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and Executive Director
of a state government-funded eResearch consortium. Prior to this, Ann was based in the UK at King’s
College London with the JISC government-funded program for eScience. Concurrently, she was a
Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Computing Research, London South Bank University.
Following her PhD, Ann was Head of Multimedia Collections at the Science Museum in London.
findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/197899ann-borda

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Tiancheng Leo Cao is a doctoral candidate from the School of Journalism and Media at the
University of Texas at Austin. His current research examines the digitization and platformization of
museum collections from the interdisciplinary perspectives of museum studies, media studies, digital
heritage studies, and cultural policy research. As a graduate research assistant at the Technology &
Information Policy Institute, he also investigates the use of surveillance technologies by the public
sector in the context of smart city development and ethical decision-making, focusing on issues of
privacy, governance, data, and public engagement.
Giuliano Gaia, a pioneer in the field of digital communications for museums in Italy, built the first
website for WWF Italy, founded the New Media Department at the Science Museum of Milan, and
created Virtual Leonardo, an online 3D interactive world that anticipated Second Life and was
mentioned in the New York Times. With Stefania Bioano, he is the co-founder of InvisibleStudio, a
cultural innovation studio based in London and Milan, and is a tenured teacher of Digital
Communication for the Arts at IULM University in Milan.
Mette Skov is an Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Department of Communication and
Psychology, Denmark. She holds a Master and a PhD degree in Library and Information Science from
the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark. Her main research interests include
everyday life information seeking, user studies, user experience and interaction design. With a special
interest in the cultural heritage domain, she has been involved in a number of projects related to how
users interact with ICT in the physical museum as well as how they interact with digitized cultural
heritage collections online. She can be contacted at: skov@ikp.aau.dk