Traditionally museums were the custodians of significant cultural and historical knowledge. In the age of open access on the internet, museums provide little value in that regards anymore. How far would you agree or disagree?

Traditionally museums were the custodians of significant cultural and historical knowledge. In the age of open access on the internet, museums provide little value in that regards anymore. How far would you agree or disagree?

This notion — that the ability of the internet to freely access cultural and historical information has made museums irrelevant — is based on a basic misunderstanding of what museums are (and do) in the first place. This assertion is in direct opposition to my beliefs — I feel museums serve purposes that are irreplaceable and cannot be sufficiently replicated even if the accessibility of knowledge has another revolution courtesy of digital information, one which I have argued we have already been through with increasing sophistication since 1993.

The most obvious rebuttal to the idea relates directly to what museum collections are. Museums hold physical objects — original artefacts, artworks, specimens and instruments —on views of your feels The always base for values of cultural and historical evidence be as physical Reality rather than information. The real deal with an original ancient manuscript, in front of real Renaissance painting, or handling the artefact once held by historical figures thousands of years ago gives a type of direct connection to the past that no digital reproduction, regardless 0f resolution or immersive deployability can deliver. Sure, the internet can show you a picture of the Rosetta Stone but it cannot give you standing in front of the actual stone, touching the same surface upon which Egyptian scribes wrote thousands of years before Christ — that is only something the British Museum can do. This fundamental distinction between information about an object and direct encounter with the object is not a pedantic one: It cuts to the heart to what museums can actually promise.

The “educational” value of the physical environment in museums also goes way beyond its role as a technology for transmitting factual information. Curated exhibitions yield tangible scapes of relief by arranging objects with contextual information alongside interpretive frameworks in spatial sequencings that create experiences of significant density and coherence — experiences that reward prolonged, uninterrupted embodied engagement in ways unlike internet browsing given the hyperlinked, distraction-saturated nature of its environment. The sort of attentive quality that a well-struck museum exhibition calls for — an intentional, meditative, linear experience with a small set of objects and accompanying text that merit such prolonged attention — yields kinds of knowledge and feeling that the fragmented information architecture of the internet cannot hope to achieve.

Besides, some important conservation functions museums do (which are totally separate from the information-providing function). Maintaining unique and irreplaceable cultural objects in a state of viability over decades or centuries — controlling temperature, humidity, light exposure, handling conditions which no private citizen or digital service could ever hope to amply guarantee but by near-superhuman precision — represents a civilisational responsibility that museums perform for humanity. In any case, you could perfect the process of every museum digitising its collection in full and with greater fidelity than the originals held but burning the objects could only be described as a catastrophic loss to human heritage, one that no amount of digital archival work can recover.

And then of course there is the social and community function that museums fulfil, which took on another aspect that the internet cannot replace. Museums are by nature a true public space: spaces where diverse constituencies come together to come in contact with a shared culture heritage — schools work on developing the sense of historical place that rarely translates into tangible terms through learning goals, families sharing little moments and therefore history as well, individuals from divergent backgrounds touching upon the same common ground that is shared human history. However, the civic and democratic significance of institutions that democratize extraordinary cultural resources regardless of social background is a dimension of cultural life that internet access cannot replace — however important.

In addition, equating what can be known by a museum with what can be found on the Internet vastly overestimates the reliability, contextual richness and interpretive depth of digital content as it is generally experienced online. Museum knowledge is generated, drafted and staged by domain specialists, accepted only when their readings meet strict scholarly criteria — an epistemic infallibility that the expansive, mostly unregulated information environment of the internet cannot replicate systematically.

Ultimately the internet represents a much richer and more cosmopolitan way of accessing cultural and historical information which is certainly healthy to have and adds value if we view that kind of thing as complementary to but not in place of visiting a museum. Physical engagement with real things, professional curation, commitment to preservation, and shared civic cultural place is what makes museums utterly fundamental — these qualities guarantee a continued need for museums as long as people continue to value their physical connection between our material culture and ourselves.