Unlocking the museum: A manifesto

Abstract

At the same time that the Internet is becoming more accessible to large numbers of people and information consumers are becoming information producers, traditional methods of organizing, describing, and providing access to “documents” are being overwhelmed by the ever-increasing number of digitized materials. Another parallel occurrence is the disappearance of cultural and indigenous knowledge as environments and peoples cease to exist. Therefore, the knowledge and ability to build and describe collections needs to be spread among a larger distributed group of participants. Three mechanisms are needed to facilitate this “unlocking” of collections and their management: the distributed description and annotation of documents, distributed collection building, and distributed knowledge creation.