Major museums worldwide are starting to use social media such as blogs, podcasts and online video to encourage users to participate in their programs.

This book chapter was published in Theorizing digital cultural heritage: a critical discourse, edited by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine, MIT press, 2007.

Despite the proliferation of web-based news and information services, there remains a lack of online destinations from which to obtain reliable and authoritative cultural knowledge. In many countries, such knowledge is provided by cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. Recent discussion suggests that social media – including blogs, wikis and digital stories – may provide a creative solution to the ongoing interaction between cultural institutions and communities of interest.

Collections, audiences, distribution and access will continue to be the central concerns, writes ANGELINA RUSSO.

Social media enable cultural participants to both explore images of themselves and distribute those images across broad online social networks.

Watkins, J., (2007) ‘Social Media, Participatory Design and Cultural Engagement’. OzCHI Conference, Adelaide, November 2007.

Watkins, J. and Russo, A., (2007) ‘Participatory Design and Co-creativity in Cultural Institutions’. Museums Australia Conference, Canberra, May 2007. http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/

Watkins, J. and Russo, A., (2007) ‘Cultural Institutions, Co-creativity and Communities of Interest’, in Schuler, D. (ed.), Online Communities and Social Computing, HCII 2007, LNCS 4564, pp. 212–221.

Issues of spatial distribution, allocation and access to resources prevail when establishing a long-term and viable e-community within the cultural sector.