Museums conduct activity both in the physical and digital realms. Even
if the majority of museums, seen in a global perspective, have yet to
establish a presence on the Internet, such things as museum websites
are a well-established facet of museum activity. In the museum
profession's conventional frame of reference, this projection of
museum activity into the digital environment is subservient to the
real museum work conducted at real museums with real objects. The
various documents, images, sound recordings, and other multimedia
material that we contribute to the vast repository of information
that is the Internet, are useful surrogates for objects but are not
objects, themselves.

From the perspective of professions that are immediately anchored
in the networking environment, a digital document is very much an
object -- a "binary object" as opposed to a "physical object" -- but
an object nonetheless. (This distinction can also be made using the
terms "digital" and "tangible", but their etymologies are not entirely
separate.)  If museums are to harness the full potential afforded by
the Internet, we need to accommodate the notion of curatorial
responsibility for binary objects. This is not a simple matter of
making physical surrogates for works that were originally created
digitally and then treating the bearers of those recordings as
physical objects in a traditional manner.

The Internet provides a platform for creative cultural action that not
just can, but must, be regarded as intangible cultural property every
bit as clearly as, say, a live musical performance. There are
circumstances that can render both non-amenable to physical
encapsulation. Exemplifying with performance originating in the
physical realm, this would include situations where tradition and/or
law forbids any form of recording. What remains is the eyewitness
chronicle of such an event and, in this day and age, the medium by
which such a thing is disseminated is as likely to be digital as it is
to be physical. (If anything, electronic publication may be the more
common of the two modes.)

In many such situations an object only becomes meaningful when taken
together with contextual information borne by other media. It may also
be that the secondary material is all that exists. The object
presented to the public thus becomes the sum of itself and the
external descriptive material. This is an obvious restatement of a
principle that has long be at the heart of museum activity, but it
also gives rise to another spectrum alongside the one mentioned at the
outset of this message. An object will reside on a continuum spanning
from the physical realm into the digital, and a given object may be
located at any point on this spectrum.

All are certainly the concern of museums. And -- heresy of heresies --
there is no intrinsic reason why an organization requires a physical
nexus to be able apply sound museological principles to increasing the
public understanding of museum objects, and to enhancing their
enjoyment of that experience.

/Cary

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Change ICOM-L subscription options, unsubscribe, and search the
archives at:  http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/icom-l.html