INTRODUCTION

When you overhear a conversation over coffee like the one that is about to be recounted here you more than suspect that things are changing in musingplaces. In fact, if you pay enough attention you will know that there has been something of a fundamental shift going on in the ways public museums and art galleries are being understood. 

By-an-large these changes have crept up on musers and museologists alike. 

Paraphrased, the conversation went pretty much like this. Two sets of grandparents were talking about a recent spate of 'wet weekends' and the conversation quite quickly moved on to what you can do with children at such times. 'Grandies No.1 reminisced that they used pack the family off to the museum and "let the kids loose ... and ... they would wonder off in various directions and keep themselves happy and amused for hours".  It seems it was a sure fire solution for all concerned. Indeed, wet weekends might even have been looked forward to.

Likewise, 'Grandies' No. 2  had similar memories but they said "we tried it last weekend with our grandchildren and it didn't work. Well we didn't actually get out of the house because they insisted that it was a waste of time because they had their computers and there was much more to do on them than at the museum. They told us that they went to the museum with school last week and that we have done all that stuff already."

Both 'Grandies lamented the loss of the museum as a 'wet weekend tactic' and mused upon how much the local museum had meant to them when they were children and then to their children – all of whom it seems were living fulfilled lives. It seems they both attributed at least some of their well being to wet weekends and other times spent in museums.

If you pay close attention to a conversation like this there is as much to be gleaned as there is still to be learnt within the physical and ancillary 'spaces' of museums. Albeit that the virtual experience is rich and getting richer there is nothing quite like the sensate experience of being in the tangible presence of something, sometimes being allowed to touch it, smell 

it even sometimes, but always 'experiencing' it in a multidimensional way – and personally ... and up close.

What to do? If the museologists wish to remain relevant it seems they need to move with the field and faster. The point that seemingly is being missed, or is it discounted, is the musingplaces' ancillary spaces – their online world and mobile outreach spaces – have taken 'museing' outside the classical architecture and it going on all over, all the time and everywhere all at once. Yet it is not quite that simple as these 'ancillary spaces' are creating new opportunities/space within the physical musing places once visited more often than many are now. 

There has been a paradigm shift that some musing places have acknowledged and that is yet to be understood and embraced by others.

Like it is with newspapers, educational institutions across the board, corporate administration, retail shopping et al, change has generated new opportunities and superseded others. In a 21st C context, the status quo of yesterday no longer 'cuts it' but it is not meaning the death of museums – far from it.