The new communication technologies for sharing and participatory Italian university museums

Abstract

Thanks to their peculiar identities linked to the specific disciplines which determined their creation, university museums offer an interesting experience to reflect on the role that the community of museum professionals and experts can engage within the production of cultural content - in particular through the use of databases of their collections - to activate social tools, and to design interfaces for contents typical of applications offered by the perspectives of Web 2.0 for the passage from information to knowledge, which is fundamental for the institutional goals of museums, that is to say ‘education and study’. The creation of an observatory on the use of Web 2.0 tools by university museums could be useful to monitor the existence and the use by university museums of social networks through an official channel.