Weblog on virtual museums and metamuseums

http://www.virtual-museum.at

The Virtual Museums-weblog is aimed at communicating and discussing development concerning virtual museums and meta museums both on the net and elsewhere. They provide an interesting overview of web resources about digital museums and online museology, as well as information on museum ontologies and metadata in general.

However, it seems that this weblog has not been very active lately. Some of the articles are outdated in the meantime. But there are some interesting texts, like the reflections of Werner Schweibenz on the shift of traditional museums into memory institutions. He shows how digital media influences the curatorial practices in European museums. Furthermore, he compares a variety of definitions of museums and shows how much these concepts have changed over the last years. And I found this quote of Tomislav Sola, which I regard as essential concerning the future development of museums worldwide:
“When we are collecting objects we are collecting information” “The traditional museum piece, an item, a three-dimensional fact, is only a datum among a complex of museum information, of a message. We do not have museums because of the objects they contain but because of the concepts that these objects help to convey”.