Museums and Digital Confidence: Organisation, Collection, Interface (Critical Perspectives on Museums and Digital Technology)

Museums and Digital Confidence explores the evolving nature of digital practices in museums. It interrogates the skills, literacies, and mindsets that can support the use of digital technologies within these institutions. It also reflects on why digital adoption has faltered (at times), why digital continues to matter, and how the digital museum may flourish into the future.

Underscored by national and international research, this edited volume brings together leading experts from museology, museum management and curation, organisational studies, and cultural policy to outline a new framing of museum digital confidence. It does so by offering a series of critically engaged perspectives derived from a range of practices that reveal how museums have managed to successfully re-orient themselves in order to not only face but also embrace the ongoing challenges presented by the highly interconnected, media-pervasive, and technologised world to which contemporary museums must continually adapt. This book presents a set of ‘framings’ to help museums clarify how they can work purposefully, productively, and sustainably with digital at an organisational level, in terms of managing collections, and through curating public-facing exhibitions and programmes.

Museums and Digital Confidence shares insights that will be essential reading for students, researchers, and museum practitioners who are interested in better understanding – and acting upon – the digital transformation of museums.

Ross Parry is Professor of Museum Technology and founding director of the Institute for Digital Culture, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.

Vince Dziekan is a senior academic and practitioner-researcher at Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA), Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and an honorary research fellow with the Institute for Digital Culture, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.

Karin de Wild is Assistant Professor in Contemporary Museum and Collection Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands.