Popular Culture Review Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter 2015 | Page 94

Digitizing and Downloading Culture: Museums in the Age of Multimedia The rapid evolution of technology over the last two decades has ushered in a new era for the public museum, which has undergone multi-faceted transformations over the last century, as individual cultures have decided what is and is not worth preserving in formal institutions. In addition to traditional public institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre, which typically house foreign cultural antiquities, smaller collection specific museums have also proliferated, with from specialties from the history of German Leather production to fields of science and engineering to specific historical tragedies or genocides. Whether a museum is national, regional, or local, university or private— single subject collections or place and object based—the very nature of collection, and in most cases, public exhibition, have radically changed over the last two decades. Rather than discuss the reconceptualization of museums in the post-modern era, this short essay instead explores the ways in which technology is being incorporated into the museum experience, both physical visits and virtual tours and applications, the way digital collections are being composed, and how virtual interaction influences the future of the museum experience itself. In 1984, the Museums Association adopted the following definition to succinctly express the cultural purpose of the museum: “A museum is an institution which collects, documents, preserves, exhibits, and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit” (Pearce 2). Although the origin of the museum lies in the nineteenth-century, the development of the museum as an institution over the last two centuries has reflected and enhanced this cultural concern. Modernity in particular was concerned with the development of meta-narratives, overarching discourses through which objective realities and eternal truths could be defined and expressed (2). Museums were, and still are, seen as playing a part in the development of the citizen, serving an educational purpose (3). Objects, which can have lives much longer than our own, have the power to carry the past into the present by virtue of their “real" relationship to past events—which is just as true for casts, copies and fakes as it is for more orthodox material, because all such copies bear their own “rear relationship to the impulse which created them, and have their own place in the history of perception and taste (Jones 1900, quoted in Pearce, 24). Perceptions of reality are fundamental to the collecting process, as well as the process of curatorial effort and the art of exhibition (Pearce 24). 90