Museums As Hypermedia: Interactivity on a Museum-Wide Scale

Good management begins with planning, and at the foundations of planning must lie an understanding of the nature of the institution: what its role is in society and how it goes about fulfilling that role. In my own institution, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC) the driving vision of the Director, George MacDonald, was crucial to the project, during the '80s, to create a new museum responsive to the needs of the society it must serve. Of course, a guiding vision is not by itself enough; you must also instil it into the corporate culture. But I do not wish here to address practical issues such as getting management to "buy in", communicating the vision to staff, and ensuring fiscal and other resources are sufficient to achieve the goals implicit in the vision; although these things are vital to managing any project. Rather, I propose to restrict myself to the rationalization underlying the use of interactivity in museums. In creating a museum, all individual projects must fit into the overall picture, as parts of the puzzle. When faced by fascinating and seductive technologies such as those lying behind hypermedia, there is the temptation to climb the mountain just "because it's there". Before embarking on the climb, an institution should know what it expects to achieve, and how the venture contributes to its raison d'tre.