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    • Museum design and cultural heritage - Report
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    • New Use of Media by Museums - Study for Volos
      • Introduction
      • 1. Examples of usage of new means in museums and cultural spaces (international and European experiences)
      • 2. Categorization of museums: historical, technological, thematic
      • 3. Services offered
      • 4. Comparison between North, South, East, West
      • 5. Correlation with the local productive process
      • 6. Performance of museums
      • 7. Museums in Greece using new technologies
      • 8. Cultural tourism
      • 9. Functional, organisational matters of museums
      • 10. Data around cost of investments for the creation of the infrastructure
      • 11. Financial management - exploitation - development of parallel actions
      • 12. Training of staff, development of local potential / human resources
      • 13. Correlation with the local economy and society
      • 14. Networking - interlinking between museums
      • 15. International trends and perspectives for the development of museums based on use of new technology
      • 16. Comparative presentations and conclusions
      • Bibliography
    • A New Role for Museums
    • The role of museums and children - what narrative?
    • This is not a tub - Joseph Nechvatal's observation about the new wing of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
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    • Museums Day - May 18th
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    • Technomuseum in Mannheim
    • Museum of Drawers - Herbert Distel
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16. Comparative presentations and conclusions

Certainly the Lizt museum in Budapest houses not only many pianos he played on but also a special composer desk with keys to be used for creating musical ideas. The same goes for the Bach museum in Leipzig for which a local restaurateur Volker Bielitz reconstructed the former harpsichord on which Bach played on. The authenticity of a place depends upon local people knowing and appreciating what was build then and used as an instrument to bring about that type of music. Cultural heritage without such local skills would be mute and deaf.

When George Hein was asked, if he were to construct a museum, what would it be like, he answered as follows:

“There is no such thing as the ideal museum, simply because you can never please all visitors. If I created such an institution, it would inevitably reflect my beliefs, where I come from and my vision. In general, I think museums can convey very powerful messages, as long as they have a precise point of reference. Visitors should understand what a museum is about as soon as they have entered. I will give you an example. Someone in Denmark founded a small museum after collecting all kinds of animals that live there. It is his own personal museum. One of my favorite museums is a museum dedicated to George Washington that contains some of his personal objects. Sometimes museums don’t realize how important it is to focus somewhere.” [1]

Perspectives

There is a growing concern in the world of museums that too much emphasis is being put on spectacular block-buster types of exhibitions that cost a lot and which sideline permanent collections and other functions of a museum such as encouraging scholarship and providing long lasting experiences of cultural heritage, different cultures and civilizations.

Joe Rishel, senior curator of European paintings before 1900 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: “Museums are using the fevered pace of special exhibitions to bring visitors. They have trained the public to come to them, and the permanent collections are often in danger of becoming a secondary experience.” [2]

Many museums are developing new methods for making their permanent collections more accessible to visitors. Called ‘core products’ in marketing terms, museums resort to new advertising and promotion strategies that includes all kinds of sponsorships and use of the rich media offered by the Information Society. The goal remains, however, the same: ‘to attract more visitors’ – a quantitative goal and measure of success, if funding is to be secured over a longer period of time. Museums feel that financial pressure. Especially costs for special exhibitions have risen and this especially with regards to traveling exhibitions in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. It leaves the museums with very small or shrinking acquisition budgets to add to their permanent collections. More and more they must rely on a wealthy board of trustees and / or corporate sponsorship even though there is already talk about the post corporate era i.e. when a sponsor has no longer the money after the high tech bubble burst or else the company no more that extra capital it could afford to invest in some other prestigious exhibition.

 

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