Museums in the Digital Age

Dr. Susana Bautista’s book will aid us in seeing the power of digital technology as more than a marketing tool or a glitzy program … She will help us understand it as fundamentally related to the organizational mission, goals, and community of museums. This book will become one of our navigational tools, reminding us to think of museums primarily as social institutions. Museums in the Digital Age: Changing Meanings of Place, Community, and Culture will help us to harness the social networks of visitors and define the social capital museums can provide to the public. -- Selma Holo, USC Fisher Museum of Art, Director
Susana Bautista elaborates the dynamic transformation underway as museums creatively adopt a wide range of new technologies.  Developing the notion of the “distributed museum,” she deftly describes a range of new practices that extend the place of the museum.  No longer bound by a physical space, through the use of networks, the web, and mobile media, museums not only serve local communities, but also global ones as well.  Bautista’s research is thorough and evocative; her insights accumulate, such that we can better appreciate the changing nature of the museum in a digital age. -- Anne Balsamo, Dean of the School of Media Studies, Professor of Media Studies, The New School for Public Engagement
It is a continuing source of amazement that so few media scholars think of museums as part of the mass media, although they undoubtedly should be seen as such. And at the same time, many museum professionals view the mass media as foreign, and threatening to the mission of the museum. Yet museums are institutions that serve to connect heterogeneous publics with the creative achievements of past and present creators, and this is not a bad definition of mass media. As we move further into the digital age it is also clear that museums, like every other institution in our society, must come to terms with the new technologies that are re-shaping our lives. For the museums that get it, these new circumstances offer both a challenge and an opportunity to rethink their mission, and extend their reach. Susana Bautista’s pioneering studies of five exemplary museums will help us all better to understand the present state of museums’ digital engagement, and to think together about the exciting possibilities that lie ahead. -- Larry Gross, Vice Dean, School of Communication Director, and Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California
A very impressive, well researched core sample of the history and state of public-facing museum technologies as of its writing. Bautista correctly identifies the schism between many art museums' on-site and online behaviors, but perhaps prudently stops short of calling for an alignment between the two, preferring to posit a complementarity between chapel-like galleries and the openness and accessibility inherent to the digital space. -- Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art