ABSTRACT
George Brown Goode was an ichthyologist and secretary of the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex based in the United States. He was renowned as a museum thinker, and his writings are widely read. In the late 1800s, Goode stated that 'the museum must, in order to perform its proper functions, contribute to the advancement of learning through the increase as well as through the diffusion of knowledge' (Goode, 1891/1991, p. 337). Goode identified that the nature of museum work was not only around knowledge creation but knowledge generation and ultimately, learning. In 1999 Stephen Weil, the US-based museum theorist, declared that museums must transform themselves from ‘. . . being about something to being for somebody’ (Weil, 1999, p. 229). In 2012 the ways museums communicate and interact with their audiences has undergone a rapid and profound transformation. This has been especially noticeable over the past five years, due to the rise of the Internet and social media together with the explosion in mobile technologies.
