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Museums in the Digital Age: Changing Meanings of Place, Community, and Culture showcases how the use of technology in museums should be understood as factors directly related to the museums’ notion of community, local culture, and place, whether these places are in mid-America, urban metropolises, or ethnically diverse and underserved communities. Here, museum expert Susana Smith Bautista brings more than twenty years of experience in cultural institutes in Los Angeles, New York, and Greece to propose a social understanding of why museums should be adopting technology, and how it should be adapted based on their particular missions, communities, and places. This book is timely because we are in the midst of the digital age, which is rapidly changing due to rapidly changing developments in technology and society as well, with social adaptations of technology. Theory is always racing to catch up with practice in the digital age, but theory remains a critical - and often neglected - component to accompany the practical application of technology in museums. In order to illustrate these points, the book presents five case studies of the most technologically advanced art museums in the United States today: The Indianapolis Museum of ArtThe Walker Art CenterThe San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern ArtThe Brooklyn Museum Each case study ends with a Lessons Learned section to bring these points home. While the case studies focus on museums in the United States, and also on art museums, this book is relevant to all types of museums and to museums all over the world, as they equally face the challenge of incorporating technology into their institutions. Although these case studies are all well-established and well-endowed museums, Bautista reveals valuable insight into the difficulties they face and the questions they are asking which are relevant to even the smallest museum or community cultural center.

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Reviews

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 Hole, Director, USC Fisher Museum of Art and USC Dornsife International Museum Institute

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 Hole, Director, USC Fisher Museum of Art and USC Dornsife International Museum Institute 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

Author Information

Susana Smith Bautista is a multidisciplinary scholar on museums, digital technology, and the arts.

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