This useful collection of previously published essays appears in a series of course readers in museum studies edited by Simon Knell. The goal of this particular anthology is to illuminate the impact of digital media on museum exhibitions and on the conserving of digital artifacts in museums. Knell’s explanation of the general goals of the series ends with a citation from Michel Foucault as a guide to each volume’s efforts to update museum studies curricula. With that directive, it is inevitable that the series will have to navigate between the most mundane practical concerns, in this case how to run a museum’s digital collections and exhibitions, and more theoretical issues involving the implications of conserving an ephemeral digital heritage and putting exhibitions online. The two overlapping conflicts, or contradictions, of museum studies (i.e., practical versus theoretical and the virtual versus actual objects) challenge Museums in a Digital Age to get these concerns to address each other or at least to speak the same language.

Ross Parry, who edited the anthology, organizes the chapters into seven sections (prefaced by his useful introductions) that loosely correspond to the history and management of information, the real and virtual spaces of exhibitions, access and usability, interpretive and educational services, the status of museum artifacts (including digital), sustainability and technical production issues, and speculations on the future of museums. That organization certainly fits neatly with courses in museum studies, but, in following Parry’s description of the volume as a collage, one might also cross-index the chapters into four categories: history of practices, new gadgets and practices, usability of technological resources, and appealing to a wider (and different) audience.

Parry also suggests alternative ways to group the chapters and to explain the sometimes jarring juxtapositions of, for example, more foundational essays with theoretically speculative ones. He offers a few alternative approaches to organizing the selections, and even points to exclusions and a lack of complete coverage of any field. One might wonder if the volume would be better as a digital document organized for each reading and reader as suits current concerns and contingencies. It is odd that an anthology celebrating digital culture’s impact on museums is not delivered in a more interactive form (even though Parry does his best to give the reader instructions and guides to reading the work as an interactive collage). Apparently the tensions, and perceived threat, surrounding the virtual in scholarly presentation have a corollary in museums.

Parry notes the initial defensiveness of museums to adopt the internet as a threat to encouraging visits to the physical museum. Essays by David Williams and Andrew Roberts describe historical changes in the role computers play with museum professionals. Elizabeth Orna and Charles Pettitt broaden this history by examining the role of information in museums. Chapters by Erkki Huhtamo and Antonio M. Battro suggest precursors to the virtual museum, and Robert Chenhall and David Vance discuss the changing definitions of the museum’s objects.

Traditionally, conservation and the exhibition of material objects were the primary reasons for museums. Have these goals changed? Parry notes that museums now collect the same digital culture that until recently was deemed threatening by most curators. One can imagine how disturbed those curators would be by more recent developments examined in chapters by Andrea Bandelli, Roland Jackson, Areti Galani and Matthew Chalmers, and Konstantinos Arvanitis, who each explore aspects of the virtual museum and what the authors call museum-gadgets (i.e., computer applications for cell phones or iPads that supplement visits). In fact, one would hope that a born-digital journal such as caa.reviews would be available on a reader and/or phone.

Essays by Lev Manovich, Pierre Lèvy, Fiona Cameron, and the co-authored articles by Parry, Nick Poole and Jon Pratty, and by George Macdonald and Stephen Alsford, examine the theoretical implications of databases and shifts in digital memory and understanding. These articles could also be read as representing the theoretical wing of museum studies, and the ways in which museum studies mines other disciplines for theoretical speculations. Again, one would hope that other articles would build on these epistemological concerns, but because it is a reader (and not an anthology of current research with a narrow focus) it might have trouble serving that purpose. Instead, the reader reflects (perhaps accurately) the way that groups, in both museum studies specifically and the arts and humanities in general, speak specialized languages that often do not influence each other’s practices.

Closely related to these theoretical concerns are chapters in a section one might call the object’s aura in the virtual situation by Klaus Miller, Jennifer Trant, Matthew Gansallo, Clifford Lynch, and Marc Pachter. A related essay co-authored by Peter Lyman and Howard Besser looks at different aspects of the digital artifact, including using it as a tool as well as exhibiting digital objects that have no antecedent in a non-digital reality (e.g., Tate’s Arts Projects Online).

Chapters by Lorna Abungu, Kevin Carey, Ranjit Makkuni, and co-authored chapters by Brian Kelly, Lawrite Phipps and Caro Howell, and by Danial Cunliffe, Efmorphia Kritou, and Douglas Tudhope all speak to the issue of broadening the museum audience to a multicultural, differently-abled, and world-wide reach. This section does not seem to speak the same language as the theoretical articles, and depends on social-scientific models of research.

The chapters by Peter Walsh, Olivia C. Frost, Ben Gammon, Maria Roussou, and the co-authored chapter by Christian Heath and Dirk vom Lehn each examine what visitors actually get out of the digital interactions designed by museums. In a related nuts-and-bolts section, chapters by Matthew Stiff, Paul Conway, Maria Economou, and Diane M. Zorich explore practical considerations for using digital materials in a museum context. David Bearman’s pleas for common standards for networked cultural heritage fit with the usability research (although it appears in the theory section). One might look for common frames and perspectives that have less mundane categories of usability.

In the speculative section, the articles that first appeared between five and thirteen years ago address the future of the museum, and some—such as Manuel Castells’s essay—have had an influence outside of museum studies. This more speculative section has chapters by Tomislav Šola, Knell, and a conclusion by Parry, but even with the conclusion it has the fewest chapters. Does this perhaps reflect the uncertain future of museums?

One of the anthology’s most interesting, and perhaps contentious, insights appears in Jennifer Trant’s discussion of the design of virtual museums. She argues that the virtual space must not exactly correspond to the actual museum’s layout and design. If it did, then the virtual visitor would find the experience both difficult to navigate and boring to move through. The virtual experience is not the same as the real-life visit, and it should not be treated as simply a secondary (and poor) copy. Related to this notion of designing museum exhibitions as medium-specific for particular devices and/or spaces, Konstantinos Arvanitis discusses the use of GPS-linked exhibitions, and one is reminded of projects that attempt to bring the museum to the field rather than insert field research into a museum.

A useful guide for similar and future anthologies in this area would be a list, with URL links, to digital exhibitions and other innovative online presentations. Some of these have attempted to key interviews and historical documents to specific GPS locations; in this way a visitor to a location could learn about the buried, effaced, removed, or contested history under, for example, a parking lot or a modern skyscraper. An abandoned exhibition project called Earth Echoes presented various perspectives on a large lawn at a public garden and historical house. A hand-held device brought up interviews with an older man who as a child lived in the house and with an African American man who cut the grass with a scythe (and is now the superintendent of the public school system). It made an empty field fill with historical relevance.

In the seven sections of Museums in a Digital Age, Parry puts various discourses in conversation in an attempt to make the theoretical discussion speak to the instrumentalist concerns of running a digital collection and to show how the project of conserving and preserving cultural heritage can make sense when the “objects” are virtual digital phenomena. The anthology does not completely succeed in accomplishing this daunting goal; the chapters focused on practical concerns do not seem motivated by, or confronting of, the theoretical implications of their new type of work. The theoretical articles do not focus on ways to create an applied grammatology (a theoretically guided media-making method developed by Gregory Ulmer in a series of books, videos, and e-media since the mid-1980s), for example, or address directly the instrumentalism of museum staffs (e.g., implementing a technological solution without reference to the theoretical implications of those choices). Likewise, the articles that focus on cultural heritage and museum practices do not adequately address the issue of a lack of an actual object to display.

That said, the individual articles are insightful and useful. With work shared by both editor and reader, one can make the articles talk to each other. This lack of a direct dialogue is not limited to museum studies, but is the major lacuna of the digital humanities. This useful volume will serve the needs of courses in museum studies and administration very well, and museum professionals should have it on their required reading lists; but the anthology does not (and probably cannot) deal with the larger issues of digital culture’s impact on museum studies (not just museums).

Museum studies has already started to share concerns with other disciplines, and, for example, the January 2010 issue of PMLA (the journal of the Modern Language Association) includes a section on museum studies with the lead guest column by cultural theorist Mieke Bal. The issue represents the new centrality of museum studies in the humanities, especially as the arts and humanities, as well as the sciences, seek ways to use the internet, digital media, and interactivity in reaching an audience. It also suggests that museum studies scholarship continues to move forward, and that new technologies provoke and challenge practices and theories.

All this attention and activity makes Museums in a Digital Age both important and inevitably dated as it tries to illuminate a shifting and rapidly changing target. With a bricoleur’s spirit, one that the editor encourages, a student of museum studies will get much from this collection. What the volume calls for, even in its exclusions, is a way in which the various pieces might speak to each other so that the result is less of a collage (like a salad) of approaches and more of a montage (like a soufflé). Contemporary digital culture already spews collage after collage (image and text salads), but what museums, and by extension museum studies, must find is the recipe for digital soufflé montage.