5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

Online museums are not only about providing extensive digital content, but also
about how one approaches the audience, how the museum presents itself in the
virtual world. Of course, giving people free access to collections is a step into the
right direction of making art accessible, but the user-driven, engaging,
participatory and accessible museum is not guaranteed by the provision of rich
cultural content databases.
In other words: connectivity to the Web does not necessarily lead to increased
levels of accessibility of art. Rather, what one can observe is that even if there
are many exceptions, there are also a great number of online museums which
have an extensive amount of digital content, yet what is being produced is an
illusion of access.
Looking at the examples mentioned above, one can argue that there is no doubt
that every day more information from and about museums, archives and libraries
is uploaded to the World Wide Web. Yet, even if some museums recognise “that
new technology is not an answer in itself to extending access,” 91 there are a
substantial number of examples of museum websites whose massive amount of
digitized cultural content produces an illusion of access; and it is this illusion that
is a central theme of this research.
91 In Understanding the Future: Museums and the 21 st Century – Responses to Consultation, the
Natural History Museum London, for example, argues that ‘Projects to provide electronic access
should be tailored to the needs of the user and provide a ‘whole system’ approach.’ In response to
the same consultation MDA argues that it ‘believes that it is essential for the application of ICT
by museums to be user-driven rather than technology-driven. In recent years, we have seen a
significant number of pilot projects to evaluate new or emergent technologies. We believe that it
is time to take the lessons learned through this process and apply them to the creation of stable
and sustainable services that are based on established technologies and standards.”
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