Museum websites: creating greater access to the New Zealand art collection?

Abstract

This thesis investigates art gallery websites and the idea of creating greater access to museum and art gallery collections through re-democratisation. How the Internet can help museums achieve this with a New Zealand focus is examined in this thesis through the use of four New Zealand art gallery website case studies. Four international examples will be used to provide a comparison to what the New Zealand examples are achieving. The democratization of the museum (when museums first opened to the public) is explored in the first chapter to outline the changing attitudes of the museum worker to the public and the developing use of the public collection. The use of a museum's collection on each gallery's website is the focus of the case studies, exploring how the images are displayed, how they can be searched and what supporting information is available for them. This explores what is currently occurring on the websites and the relationship these have with increasing access to the collection by the public. The four New Zealand art galleries are the Auckland Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa (holding the national collection), the Christchurch Art Gallery and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery as they are in the four main centres of New Zealand. The international case studies are of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate and the National Gallery, London. Conclusions are drawn which indicate that the Internet has much potential to increase access to museum collections. The websites have not yet reached their full potential in the New Zealand examples, but are further developed in the international examples.