[…] museums will have to change to take advantage of the turmoil roiling our colleagues in education.
We’ll need to be open and available. We need to let our collections be used by others for their ends. That means sharing online collections and images as open data, being open to collaborations, letting go.
It means that we need to break down the walls that separate curatorial expertise and educational expertise within the museum. Curators and curatorial knowledge will have to be open to the public. The one rule of the web is disintermediation: no more gatekeepers. Curators will need to be open directly to their audiences. Museum educators will need to know collections and content. Those jobs will merge as the museum opens up.
Passages from a recent article by Steven Lubar – Director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. Read the entire piece on the Center for the Future of Museums Blog.
More on Steven Lubar’s excellent blog
