Introduction: When Museum Informatics Meets theWorld Wide Web, It Generates Energy

David Bearman and Jennifer TrantArchives & Museum Informatics, 2008 Murray Avenue, Suite D, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15217-2104.E-mail: dbear@archimuse.com; http://www.archimuse.com

Application domains both adapt technologies in distinc-tive ways and manifest requirements that can propel basicresearch in novel directions. Museum informatics is onesuch domain, and its impacts on the World Wide Web are ofboth sorts. The half-dozen articles we have selected fromthe 1999 Museums and the Web Conference for this specialissue of JASIS were chosen because, collectively, theydelineate important concerns of museum informatics as anapplication domain, and call for new methods in informa-tion science as a whole.

At its most basic, this concern for the visitor is manifestin the design of museum spaces. Paterno et al. ask of webdesign what every museum exhibition designer faces withevery exhibition: Why should each visitor to an informationresource see it in the same way, when their knowledge,expertise, and purposes are so different? Although theyarrive by way of a requirement of museum informatics, theproblem they are confronting is central to the future ofe-commerce—if people do not see themselves in what theyfind presented to them on the web, and if the responses fromthe system are addressed to some one else, they will leaveunsatisfied. By taking the problem in two stages—first cre-ating some test response-types and allowing visitors to selfidentify, and then exploring how this model could be mademore complex in the types it presents and in its response tovisitor input—these researchers are providing usable an-swers, on their way towards analysis of an exceptionallycomplex research problem.

Museum information spaces also pose informationalchallenges. Dworman, Kimbrough, and Patch expose thelimitations of the best developed area of information sci-ence, information retrieval methods, when they ask a ques-tion basic to any “collection” of information: what attributesare correlated in this collection? In museum informatics,this is an obvious question, as it would be in legal research(with the documents for a court case) or regulatory enforce-

ment (with the records of a company), but it requires meth-ods that are, until now, quite undeveloped in informationscience as a whole.

Day-to-day tasks in museums are highly visual, andinformation resources tend to demand more multimediaintegration than team tasks in much of the business world.Marty’s application of workflow-enhancing informationprocessing methods to a typical museum situation—plan-ning a reinstallation of galleries—exposes the challenges ofapplying technology solutions to a demanding applicationdomain and demonstrates the likely benefits such methodswill have when applied to other design intensive businessprocesses. Importantly, Marty recognizes the social infor-matics of the situation as well, and can reflect on the impactof these changes in working methods on the environment inwhich the work takes place.

Social interaction is the key to learning in the museum.Paolini et al. take the methods developed for that least realuniverse of video games and explore how they could beused to make real human interaction possible in the world ofvirtual cultural experiences. Simply by taking the require-ments of museum informatics—interaction with objects andwith people—to the World Wide Web, they have exposed ahuge new area for research and development and havebegun to delineate requirements for object-based learningand social interaction that have relevance to other domainsranging from distance education to future leisure life.

Museum visits, and museum exhibitions, are about mak-ing meanings. Peter Walsh reminds us that what we see islearned, and it changes as our expectations change. Throughthe prism of museum content, artifacts convey both whatthey are to us today and what they were to others when theywere first created or discovered. Walsh asks us to examinethe way in which current technology may be changing whatwe see. The tools of virtuality, no less than the microscope,take us to a world that is beyond our human perception, andin so doing, transform the reality of the world in which welive by investing it with a potentiality it previously lacked,and which we never again will be without.© 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Sometimes tools get in the way. Were the designers ofcomputers influenced by the traditional design of museumsin making computers so unfriendly?, asks Slavko Milecik.Could both the interface to the museum and that of thecomputer be made accessible to very small children, hand-icapped individuals, and all of us who would be delighted toreplace a keyboard or a mouse with eye movements andthought? As museum informatics struggles to meet thechallenge to expand audiences and the demands of the

Americans with Disabilities Act, Milekic elevates playful-ness to a technological imperative and explores the conse-quences.

Our hope is that in this intersection of museum informaticswith JASIS, play and research will both benefit, and that wewill see some results at future annual Museums and the WebConferences. [Full texts of other papers from 1997–1999 pre-sentations can be found on the Web at www.archimuse.com byfollowing links to mw97, mw98, and mw99.]

4 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE—January 1, 2000