HYPER-CONNECTED MUSEUMS: A NEW APPROACH TO PRESERVING CULTURAL HERITAGE
Asimi Jimoh Elebiyo
National Museums and Monuments,
Lokoja, Kogi State, Nigeria
Abstract
Since the inception of Museum in Nigeria from about 1945, Museums have been in the form of physical buildings where people visits for research, excursions and recreations. However, the introduction of the internet and the breakthrough in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the 21st century permeated all spheres and sectors of the society and altered the status-quo of a number of societal practices especially in the industry, administration, management, service delivery and a host of other institutions. Information about the Museums and its activities is constantly required by the general public, from the Museum Professional, Curators, Museum Attendants, Education Officers and Personnel who are mandated to provide it. Consequently, in-depth knowledge of the Museum, its exhibition galleries and resources of is an important quality that must be cultivated by the profession. Museums have collections that can inspire, motivate and stimulate curiosity as well as inform. The paper stretches the importance of media in educating the public about the Museum. The paper explores historical analysis in reconstructing the hyper-connected museums as a new approach to preserving cultural heritage. “It has become imperative that these development in the ICT be integrated into the system and practice of Museums in order to serve the twenty first century needs and solve its problems.
Introduction
Traditionally and till date, the classical hallmark of museum is the collection, conservation, research and education. In the last decades; museums have undergone transformation from an object-oriented repository to an increasingly open, public, and participatory social space. Its most recent transformation, brought about by the adoption of digital technology into its institutional infrastructures, public service framework, and ideological self concept, has opened a whole new dimension of museum experience. Against this backdrop museum as guardians of auratic work are having to adjust to this demographic changes and altered viewing habit in the digital age. This shift has focused on the partnerships between the museum and its visitors. Hence, museums have move its being inwardly focused on upholding and preserving the institution itself as a cultural symbol to being outwardly focused on public service.
In this context, a museum visibility within the flood of information is decisive, hence the question of whether to remain within its traditional outreach where museum work with audiences or should it allow access to broader distribution of community knowledge as well as its valuable image motifs via the social media which enable cultural participants to both explore images of themselves and distribute those across broad online social network? It is within this premise, that “Hyper-connected Museum; New Approach to preserving cultural heritage” is situated. Thus the central goal of this paper is to examine how the Internet supports new ways of thinking and learning in museums with the growing diverse audiences. This paper therefore, investigate some of the issues surrounding the use of new media in museum programs and will argue that there are strong epistemological reasons for new media to add value to museum at delivering and connecting with varied and multiple audiences. This is because high tech communication enables the museum to deliver services and collection to a wider range of audiences far beyond their cultural landscape and natural environment.
Hyper-connected Museums: A New Approach to Preserving Cultural Heritage
To guide this work it is important to provide a glimpse into basic terminologies used in this paper. These terms include museum, hyper-connected and hyper-connected museum and new media.
Museum: According to the International Council of Museums (ICOM) “A museum is a non-profit-making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and opens to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment”. (ICOM 2007).
Hyper-connected: According to the definition from Search Encyclopedia; hyper-connected is the tech communication of 21st century delivered by local networks and the internet, all of which is 24/7 and never ceases. It could also characterized by widespread or habitual use of devices that have internet such smart phones, tablets, etc.
Hyper-connected Museum: The term “hyper-connected museums” can be use to describe museums that is highly entangled in the web of Information and Communication Technology to deliver a wide range services to the public with ease and aptness at almost no cost.
New Media: It refers to “those digital media that are interactive, incorporate two-way communication and involve some forms of computing”. In his book Understanding New Media Robert Logan defines, New Media as “very easily processed, stored, transformed, retrieved, hyperlinked and perhaps most radical of all, easily search for and accessed. The term New Media would be used interchangeably with ‘Social Media’
The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Banners-Lee in 1990 gave birth to digital culture or e-culture, that allows graphical interface of the Internet, it suddenly became possible to access digital information from anywhere in the world by making use of a web browser or websites, online social platforms, online communities, online forums, blogs, internet telephony, web advertisements, online education and many more. Not only did this provide easy access to all kinds of digital information, the new medium could also be used to publish information on a global scale at almost no cost. (Manovich, 2001).
New Publics: What is understood about the museum audience for new media as compared with the audience that walks through the museum’s door is that it will be larger, different, global, and 24/7. These new services provide an opportunity to undercut charges of “elitism” that are often leveled at museums. Thus, even in museums that have high records of patronage would still start doing better than that on the site, really quite quickly.
According to Abdullahi M. Y the introduction of the internet and the breakthrough in information communication technology in the 21st century which permeated all spheres and sectors of the society and altered the status quo of a number of societal practices especially in the industry, administration, management, service delivery and a host of other societal institutions, shows that it has become imperative that these developments in the ICT be integrated into the system and practice of museums in other to serve the twenty first century needs and solve its problems:
A hyper connected museum addresses the needs and challenges of distance and also helps in connecting larger audience at the same time. A hyper connected museum also assists in challenging the status of museums at different levels. It changes the relations a museum maintains with other institutions and organizations, methods and practices of collection, management, and the relation that museums maintain with an increasingly diverse public. The use of information and communication technology positively affects means of display, research, and communication. However, because of its wider accessibility, issues of control, power and authority, ownership and access control may pose a problem though not surmountable. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are the vital technologies of the last decades, present in almost all sectors of today’s economy.
However, the transition from pre-industrial to industrial and post industrial era characterized by digitalized means of service delivery and the existence of museums in the post industrial societies implies that museums though are cultural institutions have to imbibe elements of the ICT age in other to remain relevant and useful in solving and meeting 21st century challenges. In an era characterized by increased information sharing over the internet, the imperativeness of upgrading museums to digital standards cannot be overemphasized. Marshall McLuhan (1991) is of the view that since museums and artifacts stored in it, are treated as information carriers – Medias Due to the extremely rapid development of digital ICT, a new need arises to assess the change and use of the ICT gadgets in museum as a medium of information transmission.
Museums and the Publics, the New Media Connection
The role of the museum in society has changed over time. What started out as private collections owned by royalty became public collections and the museums went from a place that was to display the wealth of the royalty to a place of education. In the 70’s and 80’s of the last century the social movements had great influence on society as a whole and again changed the museum world.(Knell et all, 2007). On top of that, funding for museums was cut short, due to the financial crisis in these years. Slowly they started to make use of marketing and communication practices to attract a wider audience and generate more income. (Britannica, 2009). Museums embraced visitor studies to learn the needs of their customers and they started to focus more on a younger public than they did before.
Now that the world is in a digital age, museums and art institutions are facing new challenging and changes. “Not only because of the new possibilities sophisticated technologies offer in day-to-day work, (for instance in the registration of collections) but also and more importantly, because these technologies provoke profound changes within museums and in their relations with public.” A power shift is taking place, by making use of new technologies the public is voicing their opinions about the exhibitions and activities of museums thereby, helping to create a connection between the museum and the public.
With the advent of smart phones, tablet and apps, museums are well aware that they are now competing with a plethora of mobile games and a thousand of news outlets that provides instant information at the tap of a finger, hence to remain relevant museum must try to adopt this technology in order not to be pushed aside. This is well captured in the opinion of Charlie Gere, 1997; who asserted that “in a world of transnational media and global communications networks new models of the museum are necessary. That are appropriate for an age of network decentered and diffused distribution of knowledge and of access and reciprocal communication.”
The adoption of new media presents its own opportunities for museums and cultural organization wanting to make their collections more accessible promote education and enhance the visitors’ experience in a cost effective ways.
As stated earlier, the adoption of these media channel provide museum with a veritable set of tools, both for the day to day work of managing collections and for reaching out to her diverse visitors, sometimes in a new interesting ways. Hence, many museums are now important destinations along with other local touristic routes, acting as a social meeting point for the different groups of visitors, as well as serving as significant research centre thereby helping to solve many, if not all issues that are traditional for museums. This is because, digital database facilitate museum registration and storage, such concentration of information in turn facilitate museum registration and storage, such concentration of information in turn facilitates research in museum collections, the complication of various lists, selections and the preparation of catalogues and curatorial and restoration documents.
Information technology can help museums in the presentation of their collections. The form of the presentation can be different – from producing high-quality digital copies of fragile works (e.g. documents or graphic works), which can be displayed as part of permanent exhibitions, to creating virtual exhibition show online and providing access to museum collections for remote users, and solving the issue of expanding the museum’s audience through attracting internet users.
In summary, social media has great influence on the ways and manner in which museum operate because, at its heart, social media is not actually about technology. Rather, it’s all about conversation and storytelling. If you have a good story to share, people will want to listen and respond. Hence, helping to bring visitors across the globe closer to the doorsteps of museum from far and near even without been physically present.
The question is, what are the prospects of a hyper connected museums and how can it be maintained so that the museum does not lose its essence? The answer to this important question is not far fetch. Given the demands of the 21st century services and the need to satisfy the curiosity of the people who are eager to know and learn from each other’s history and culture, combine with the need to cross breed in both learning and services, a digitalized or hyper connected museum services is imperative. Consequently, ICT based museums are at best a hybrid approach to ensuring that museums remain relevant in today’s fast globalizing world and that information contained are further preserved and protected for futuristic purposes. By hybrid approach I mean an attempt to marry the cultural practice of museums with the prevailing digital culture of the 21st century. This will ensure that rather than lose its relevance, museums are better positioned to sustain as well as maintain their contents. The use of Tapes, CDs, Disk, Flash drives, Photographs, and other electronic storage medium to store museum data in an online platform will ensure that such museum objects even when damaged physically are retained and saved for the future. Equally, a hyper connected museum reduces the exposure of artifacts to unnecessary direct contact thereby reducing the danger of physical tampering and mutilation. The imperativeness of such an approach is that it will help to facilitate storage and retrieval of museum information as at when due. Ignas Kapleris (1996) noted that one of the most important changes caused by the digital media is the change of the museum concept from the object centered to the visitor’s experience centered institutions (Abdullahi 2018).
Problems and Prospects of New Media in Museum Services
There is no doubt that a hyperconnected museum provides both opportunities and challenges both in the control and management of cultural heritage information that are hitherto exclusive to the curative expert narratives and educational services of museum to the public. To this, this paper provides brief benefit of social media to museum services to its end users as follows:
- The adoption of new media promotes easy access to cultural heritages and landscapes.
- It facilitates many communication through their recognized role as custodian of cultural contents.
- It promotes education
- It enhances visitors experience
- It leverages museums ability to respond to comments in arts in a quick and effective manner within a limited budget and the use of crowd-sourcing.
- Its interactive as it gives room for instant feedbacks and response
- More cost effective in the areas of storage and retrieval of information
- Easy to search for cultural information.
In spite these numerous benefits of new media to the museum – public relations, experts are quick to point that, technology is not a magic wand that can alter the state of museums outlook, its ideas and objects, but that it something that needs to be carefully considered and not use for the sake of it. Hence, when social media are used in museums, they provide an open-ended cultural information space which is structurally ambiguous. This structural ambiguity can result in many unforeseen issues:
- The museum is unable to predict the ways in which social media will be used;
- It is difficult to predict the number of people who will participate (affecting download speeds and time);
- It is difficult to plan for consistent length/duration of participation.
These issues are compounded by barriers to agile business practices within museum bureaucracies which are often slow to respond to changes in audience behaviour (Weil 2002, 3-23). Additionally, while audiences can explore collections and create new content, the resultant information they construct is a product of individual realizations of the relationship between phenomena. Unlike museum professionals, and regardless of the scholarship which may underpin the discussions which audiences bring to the social media forum, there remains a notion that this interaction is in the realm of the amateur. How will social media in museums contend with notions of authenticity and quality?
The new knowledge and platform provided by a hyper connected museum will provide opportunity for new forms of self-representation and communication. It will enhance more artistic and styled representation of museum artifacts which makes it more attractive to visitors and researchers. Chief van and Susan Legen noted that it is no longer self-evident that museums reflect and reinforce established frames of classification and interpretation developed in history, ethnology, archaeology, and other academic disciplines. Information technology strengthens the ease with which master narratives are broken open, and it may multiply the possible relations between art and artifacts from different times and places, both on-site and online. With the increasing complex nature of education, especially with the use of digital technologies and ICT facilities, museums also need to upgrade to meet these complexities. Camila Costa Barbosa (2013) provides a compelling argument that museums have to relate with the socio-economic environment in similar ways as for-profit organizations, make their operation sustainable and try to innovate in order to achieve excellence in their mission of serving the society with socio-cultural and educational purposes.
Conclusion
The derivative from the entire paper is that, increasingly on daily basis as a society, we are adapting to technological culture through use of social media that is fast becoming our behaviour. So if the museums do not try to adapt and fit into the new normal, it will be pushed aside in the scheme of events as people visit other attractions that are given them that seamless experience. Hence, museum practitioners who crave to deliver on their mandate of collecting, preserving and communicating the vast array of cultural endowment and landscape to a more diverse publics far beyond the shore of the museum buildings to the wider world then, not only do museums and cultural heritages sites not have a choice in whether or not to embrace ‘new media’ they owe it to the communities that serve to meet and engage them in a digital context.
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2. Ibid
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