ABSTRACT

Around about the turn of the 21st Century Internet technologies moved beyond static websites serving passive receivers of information and ideas. This was not some new manifestation of the World Wide Web, rather it was the cumulative effect of the changes in the ways software developers and end-users used the Internet.

Ongoing collaborative effort changed the world beyond the computer screen and among a myriad of things, it changed the ways musingplaces – physical and geographically located plus their digital manifestations in cyberspace – might be understood and imagined – reimagined.

Almost organically a consensus about shared vocabularies seems to have emerged and apparently in the absence of a centrally controlled vocabulary cum taxonomy. It is assumed that for content to be searchable, it should be categorised and grouped in some kind logical way. This was once believed as was the requirement for commonly agreed upon sets of 'descriptors' but it seems not necessarily so or at least not when they are defined from 'some far off hierarchy' – typically self assessing gatekeepers.

The World Wide Web's inventor Tim Berners-Lee, had a vision for the Web that it was "a collaborative medium, a place where we could all meet and read and write". A parallel vision for museums and art galleries – our cultural storehouses and ideas factories cum clearing houses – seems to be emerging as the places where we can meet to actively interrogate our ecological, social and cultural realities.

Social networking and mobile technologies are beginning to be defining issues for musingplaces in the 21st century. To be viable and relevant, and looking ahead in a 21st Century context, musingplaces will increasingly need to operate across three interfacing presences: 

1. Their physical site where collections can be experienced and contemplated;
2. Within the online world via websites and social media; and 
3. In the 'mobile space' in an outreach context. (Dr Lynda Kelly 2001)

What this means for how these institutions engage with their audiences in future is only beginning to be understood by musingplaces across the world.

Given the rapid pace of change, the access to new tools and the current focus on digital literacy, how will visitors 'muse' in their musingplaces across these interfacing presences? 

This set of papers and notes will attempt to identify the key trends emerging in 21st Century musingplaces, and discuss what they may mean for museum practice across the entire institution and especially so for the Communities of Ownership and Interest that have so much of their cultural treasure, heritage and knowledge systems invested in these institutions and their interfacing networks.