The Future of Museums in the Digital Age: New Models for Access to and Use of Digital Collections

The authors investigate how the transition to digitization and the Internet is affecting the management of museums’ digital collections and the challenges and opportunities it presents. Drawing from the economic literature on information technology and from a selection of current initiatives in cyberspace, they provide an analytical framework for identifying the emerging models regarding access to and use of digital collections and for evaluating the challenges to museums in their role as providers of authoritative content, the profit- ability of digital collections, and the adoption of new metrics to assess the social impact and public mission of digital collections.