How can smaller museums have access to exhibition artifacts?

Main Concept

I believe that museums should be able to collaborate with other museums. Not only in their same country but also around the world.  The Museums Association (MA), along with The Museums, Libraries & Archives Council (MLA) in the UK, indicates that a museum should “enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment.”

This means that the cultural motivation or agenda of the museum can be manipulated by different factors like: political, economical, location, etc…
The different agenda that the museum can follow, motivates me to approach the problem from different perspectives and disciplines.

The main two disciplines

Within Web Science, my main two disciplines will be:

• Museum Studies / Museology
• Information Technology for Organizations

Museum Studies

Through the museum studies, I will be attempting to explore the different museum methodologies but focusing mainly on the purposes of the museums and how the response from people. Peter Vergo mentioned in 1989

… too much about museum methods and too little about the purpose of the museum …
(Vergo, 1989: 3)

This indicates how it is not only important the methodological approach wich is directly related to Graphic Design and Visual Communication; which is my area of expertise.

The MLA indicates a basic typology of museums that can be able to target the different approach for the museum purpose within the UK.

• National museums
• Local authority museums
• University museums
• English Heritage museums
• Independent museums
• National Trust properties
• Regimental museums and armouries
• Unoccupied royal palaces

Being a Web Science research, this typology will have to be challenged and extended in order to globalize the museum typology throughout the world.

Through my research I will attempt to develop a new approach of how museums exhibit to their public by extending their exhibition material through different collaborative processes.

Information Technology for Organizations

Within the IT for Organizations, the technology developed can be able to adapted for the requirements of the institution or organization.  Through this discipline I believe I can target a different problematic of museum collaboration. Issues like: e-learning, disabled IT access, gaming, security system, etc..

A full technological approach with a sociological combination will allow the research to preview different areas of improvement. Areas in which museums, institutions and academics can be able to benefit from it.

My next step

Throughout the next days I will start to gather the essential bibliography for this research.  I will start posting the main theories and methods gathered from these books and start finding people that relate or can be able to collaborate with my research.  Ultimately I will like to find some institutions that are keen is promoting these kind of ideas to provide support to smaller museums that are struggling to get ‘out there’.