Rethinking openness: a social constructivist approach to the promises of the new museology

Abstract

From open-source software for collection management to open access initiatives for public reuse, the museum community is experiencing an ongoing transformation in what the concept of openness truly means. Adopting the social construction of technology as a theoretical framework and analytical method, this study investigates the changing attitudes and practices among museum professionals, especially how the intellectual precepts of the “new museology” have influenced the conceptualisation and operationalisation of openness. Methodologically, this study explores the archive of the Museums and the Web conference and conducts a qualitative content analysis of papers presented between 1997 and 2020 related to the topic of openness. By identifying and comparing how these papers discussed open-oriented practices, this study demonstrates how museum professionals have socially constructed the changing meanings of openness in the past twenty years and provides empirical evidence about how the new museology discourse has been realised in practice.