ABSTRACT
As universities and museums continue along a trajectory of engagement and collaboration with a diverse array of public constituencies there is still much in the way of shared and formative learning to occur. Concurrently an emergent United Kingdom (UK) tradition of museum and visitor studies is uniting the theoretical and applied aspects of museums and bridging academic and practitioner communities. The deinstitutionalization of the museum experience from physical to what Bauman might define a liquid' encounter has accelerated with changes in the governance of its production and the emergence of innovative technologies of dissemination and dialogue. Indictments of this populist approach in museums as synonymous with the demise of its aesthetic value fail to take into account the multiple types of social interactivity which result from the increasingly diverse footfall of visitors and the ways they choose to use the museum space. Museums as collections of the past and signposts of the future are engines of citizenship and collective identity.
