ABSTRACT
It is now commonplace to observe that museums and libraries, those institutions charged with the collection, preservation, and provision of access to valued cultural artifacts, texts, and knowledge, are in the midst of a sea change. Digital technologies, the Internet, and the vast social shifts that have accompanied them have thrown open the doors of such institutions to new visions, purposes, practices, and challenges. Academic libraries are beginning to reframe themselves as providing a “learning commons,” and they grapple in so doing with how to design social and physical spaces suitable for collaborative learning in networked digital environments (Keating & Gabb, 2005). Museums too have had to rethink their educational function, not only in the contexts of calls for lifelong and life-wide learning, but in the face of the affordances of digital archives and social media, which potentially dramatically broaden access to holdings and reconfigure relations to collections and curation (Russo, Watkins, & Groundwater-Smith, 2010; Tang, 2005).
