ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which public museums and libraries in the United States offer informal-learning opportunities to the born-digital generation, often as part of a creative network ecology that includes formal learning programmes and institutions. It explores an analytical framework to describe and map the distributed nature of museology in a digital age. The museum today remains a dynamic cultural institution. All signs suggest that it is undergoing yet another transformation from an early place-based cultural institution to a more dispersed modern space. Museums utilized early versions of mobile technology in the 1950s with handheld devices based on a closed-circuit shortwave radio broadcasting system. The real innovation in new museology, however, came when mobile communications were applied to new populist practices that took the museum experience out of the physical place. The chapter concludes with a set of key insights about the social and cultural implications of the use of digital media in contemporary museums and cultural institutions.
