2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition Released

written on Sep 15, 2010 by Rachel Smith

The Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts (MIDEA), the museum-focused branch of the New Media Consortium (NMC), today released the 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition. This specially-focused edition of the annual Horizon Report series considers technology use in museum settings. The report identifies and describes six emerging technologies that will likely have a significant impact on museum education and interpretation in the next one to five years. The new museum report springs from the renowned Horizon Project, the research effort that each year produces the Horizon Report for higher education.

“This first edition of the Horizon Report: Museum Edition marks a watershed moment for the report’s sponsor, the Marcus Institute for Digital Education in the Arts (MIDEA). MIDEA was launched in 2009 as the NMC’s museum-focused arm and is an increasingly major component of what we do at the NMC,” noted Larry Johnson, chief executive officer of the NMC and co-principal investigator of the project. “We hope that museum leaders, practitioners, and staff across the world use the report as a springboard for discussion around how their institutions should be thinking about emerging technology. There are unique factors that affect the uptake of new technologies in museums and having a specially focused edition of the Horizon Report for these important institutions addresses that reality. It is something we have been wanting to do for some time.”

Holly Witchey, the report’s editor and co-principal investigator, observed, “Obtaining timely and accurate information about new technologies is always going to be a challenge for museums. The goal of the Horizon Report: Museum Edition is to make that challenge less daunting. The Horizon Report is not about one-stop shopping; it’s about providing museums with regular and reliable access to information, written for them, with a view to their needs.”

The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition identifies six emerging technologies based on their time-to-adoption horizon for museum education and interpretation: one year or less, two to three years and four to five years. Key emerging technologies detailed in the report include mobiles and social media; augmented reality and location-based services; and gesture-based computing and the semantic web.

The Report also outlines key trends and challenges associated with adoption of these technologies.

Key Trends

• ‘Rich’ media — images, videos, audio, augmented reality, and animations — are becoming increasingly valuable assets in digital interpretation.
• Digitization and cataloguing projects will continue to require a significant share of museum resources.
• Increasingly, museum visitors (and staff) expect to be able to work, learn, study, and connect with their social networks in all places and at all times using whichever device they choose.
• The abundance of resources and relationships offered by open content repositories and social networks is challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.

Significant Challenges

• Far too few museums are crafting and following a comprehensive strategy to ensure that they can keep pace with even the most proven technologies.
• Funding for technology projects is too often done outside operational budgets.
• The relationships and synergies among technology use by a museum and its staff, the ways people and organizations use technology outside the museum, and the resources a museum has chosen to place online are not well understood.
• Documentation of the impact of programs delivered via digital technologies is often expected as a prerequisite for adoption or even pilot efforts, creating a “chicken versus egg” conundrum.
• Advances in workflow and content production techniques in business and industry are largely absent from similar forms of content creation in museums.
• At a time when their role is more important than ever, too many museum educators lack the training, resources, or support to address the technological opportunities and challenges they face.

The new museum report is the latest addition to the globally recognized Horizon Project, which for nearly a decade has documented emerging technology opportunities for formal education. More than 350,000 copies of previous Horizon Reports have been downloaded from the NMC website, and the readership of the overall series is estimated at more than 600,000 worldwide, spanning some 70 countries.

Download the 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition (PDF, 324K, 36 pp)

The 2010 Horizon Report: Museum Edition was produced with the gracious support of the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 11:42 pm. It is filed under news and tagged with education, horizon, report, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.