What's my museum of the future?

Museum ID Issue 21 asked their upcoming conference speakers what they thought museums of the future might be. They didn’t ask me but here’s my thoughts anyways. 

My first real internship was at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, so not really your everyday museum. Exposed to works of art of that calibre, like Bird in Space, Brancusi in 2001 to me is the same as in 2017 and I suspect even in 1988 - truly awesome experience for the visitor. Irrespective of social media in the noughts or audio guides in the 1960s a museum dedicated to great art is hard to see changing in the future. 

That said, the museums sector is not so easy to categorise with museums dedicated to migration, homelessness (both included in Issue 21), pencils, porcelain, authors and artists. Before looking forward, let's look back - what has changed since my first experience? 
The introduction of smart technology is improving accessibility to collections with more methods to share descriptions and information. A steady growth in visit numbers over the ten years shows there is time and drive in people to learn about what is stored in museums. Society is becoming more self-aware/obsessed through a ‘selfie’ culture bolstered by celebrity. Democratisation of knowledge has levelled the traditional museum model of expert to novice and we all know less information on more topics than ever before.

What will the next 10 years bring for us? In Museum ID Rosie Stanbury from Wellcome Collection notes the role museums have in facilitation. As a trusted and increasingly popular space museums can facilitate and mediate for communities. Feldman talks of the need for authenticity and as one of the last homes for tangible history the attraction of seeing the real thing continues to prove popular even if a high resolution version is available. 

I believe a third element can play an important role in the museum sector’s future - data. We have been categorising and collecting information since opening the doors and as the Information Age is upon us, surely this is where and when we can excel. Whether it be counting visits and monitoring museum behaviours from Dallas Museum of Art or using the vast data input for Europeana to function or evaluate the way this dataset is being used museums have an opportunity to monetise something they excel at. Assessment of cultural behaviour or predictions based on past recordings the rows of numbers, categorisations, measurements are ready to be harvested. 

Museum Ideas conference looks like it will continue this discussion along with many others in October at Museum of London.