ABSTRACT
Both comments come from individuals working in or with the museum sector, and both of these individuals have an expert and professional interest in cultural heritage. More signifi cantly, here, both individuals are refl ecting upon digital heritage, in particular the possibilities for expanded access that can come from a distributed but co-ordinated digital network of on-line cultural content, be it national or international. Both are presenting a vision of increased accessibility brought about by the thoughtful deployment of network technology. Both commentators, it would seem, could be writing about the same moment. The scenarios they describe could be contemporaneous, part of the same discourse. And yet, the reality is that whereas the fi rst piece is taken from a speech made by the UK’s Culture Minister in November 2005 (Lammy 2005), the second is derived from a paper delivered to a conference in Munich of the International Council of Museums, in August 1968 – almost four decades earlier (Ellin 1968a). We are left wondering, therefore, why it is that we have taken some forty years to realise these visions. Why has it taken the museum sector quite so long to begin to build these integrated information systems to which both speakers refer? Or, to put it another way: why are we still having these same conversations that we began in the late 1960s?
