Interactivity comes of age: museums and the World Wide Web

Abstract

With the speed that characterizes the entire Internet phenomenon, the International Conference on Museums and the Web, which broke new ground when it was first held in 1997, has already become an annual event of major importance to the museum world. The co‐chairs of the 1999 Conference, themselves path‐breakers in this new medium, describe how participants viewed the transformations taking place. David Bearman, President of Archives & Museum Informatics, consults on information management for cultural heritage institutions worldwide. Since 1991, he has organized and chaired the biennial conferences of the International Cultural Heritage Information Meeting (ICHIM) and is the author of over 125 books and articles on museum and archives information management issues. Jennifer Trant is a partner in Archives & Museum Informatics and was also co‐chair of ICHIM99. She serves as executive director of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), and editor‐in‐chief of Archives and Museum Informatics, the cultural heritage informatics quarterly from Kluwer Academic Publishers. She is on the programme committee of the Digital Libraries 1999 conference, and the board of the Media and Technology Committee of the American Association of Museums.

Evaluating the Adoption of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in Museums: A Comprehensive Framework

“…Museums have historically adapted to technological advancements, a journey that https://doi.org/10.33774/coe-2023-j1qmm Content not peer-reviewed by Cambridge University Press. License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 began with the use of computers for administrative purposes in the late 1970s and has evolved to the integration of virtual reality and 3D scanning for creating immersive experiences (Bearman & Trant, 1998;Perry, 2019). The rise of NFTs in the 2020s, underpinned by blockchain, represents the latest frontier in this digital transformation, offering novel paradigms for managing and disseminating art (Fenu & Pintus, 2021).…”

Digital Technologies and the Role of Data in Cultural Heritage: The Past, the Present, and the Future

“…Cultural informatics became more extrovert, a number of conferences started focusing on technology and culture (museums) and a shift has started by considering the interaction with the visitor as an equally important factor. D. Bearman, editor of 'Archives and Museums Informatics', was a pioneer in the field with numerous research on the issue of hypermedia and interactivity, as well as the presence on the web [6,20,21]. We are entering an era of technology where a huge number of changes are happening.…”

“…The simpleyet advanced for its age-research on databases and cultural spaces started to shift with the domination of the world wide web. It was the time that the Internet started to seem an ideal space for virtual museum tours and multimedia presentations [6]. Despite the fact that the humanities declined to follow the pace of technological advances, technology still remained present in several aspects of culture.…”

Organizing Knowledge in Museums: A Review of Concepts and Concerns

“…Relatively little scholarship has focused on the historical precedents of these systems. Exceptions include the work of David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (1999), Paul Marty (2007), andRoss Parry (2007;). Bearman's work in particular has focused on museum digitization.…”