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Alan
Smith, The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
Three years are a small blip in the context of a museum grounded on
the natural environment, social history and the fine arts. But for the
World Wide Web, they compress several generations of fast change. What's
the coming together of these meant for Te Papa - whose new building
opening in February 1998 is the biggest national museum project under
way anywhere in the world - and the largest single cultural investment
ever made by a New Zealand government.
There has been vigorous debate within Te Papa over what the website
should be - who should drive it - how should it add value to corporate
strategies - what it could mean for a museum whose founding statute
set the objective of its being "a forum for the nation". In the wider
context, New Zealand has a reputation for fast uptake of new information
technologies: its website has to successfully compete for attention
with those of the other major institutions of national identity. For
schools, the Web is now a mainstream knowledge access channel; there
are competitors for supply of content, yet what richer source of content
is there than the Museum's superb research-based collections? For
the indigenous people, the Maori, internet technologies are giving
real meaning to access to oral and visual information - there are
hard issues here for how the Museum presents itself.
The Conference is something of a case study of:
- one Museum building the Web into its change process;
- how intellectual property rights and revenue opportunities are
affected
- leveraging the Web potential for interaction with all New Zealanders
- a forum for the nation;
- how to ensure dynamic updating with cost-efficiency principles
- hyperlinks - the real key to museums, archives and libraries working
together
Last modified: March 16, 1998. This file can be found below http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/
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