Historiography and Virtuality

In 2004-2005, some four million people visited the Tate website. Over the same period around six million visited the Tate suite of museums physically. Tate Online, the museums’ website, is considered the fth Tate site, with now around a million discrete hits a month. Whilst it is an acknowledged leader in museum online development, the experience of this one organization is instructive and points to a new, expanding and evolving set of heritage paradigms. The internet has meant a clear shift in the ways in which museums are consumed, engaged with and visited. As Ross Parry and Nadia Arbach (2005) have argued, this brings with it an entirely new set of issues for curators and museum managers (as well as for those studying such institutions). The demographic of the audience has changed and their purposes for visiting differ. Importantly, the online visitor is not physically within the institutional museum space and their location (and therefore how they engage with the artefacts, the collection and the experience) is entirely unique to their visit (Stratton 2000, 721-31). Rather than the museum as a place being of importance, the way that the collection is presented is key. Virtual architecture impacts upon the visitor experience and this has benets ranging from easier language conversion to faster access for the disabled. The development of virtual museum interfaces is constantly evolving. Key to this development is the shifting denition of the dynamic, context and purpose of the ‘visit’. In a very real sense, the online museum has to actively compete with other attractions for the attention of the visitor and must bend to their will in terms of access, route and duration of visit. They are no longer able to physically impart meaning to an object, in the same way that the object is no longer experienced physically in any sense at all. The ‘museum’ as physical repository is replaced by the cybermuseum, a more negotiable space in all senses of the word. The engagement with the particular artefact is no longer the most important element of the ‘visit’.