IT and the Evolving Cultural Institutions

This paper aims at reviewing several developments in the process of transforming the institutions which own cultural goods, such as libraries, museums, art galleries, archives, into modern constituents of the new "Economy of culture" in the context of the "Knowledge society" of the present day. First, several factors which have set the stage,for creating the economy of culture are reviewed such as geopolitical evolutions, enabling technologies (broadband, virtual reality, web technology), new business models, and human factor evolution. A particular attention is paid to the European initiative for creating an electronic library. A cybernetic model of interactions among several agents aiming at transforming traditional cultural organizations into more effective and up-to-date organizations is proposed. This is meant to illustrate and explain the synergic evolutions in increasing the number of direct and virtual visitors of cultural institutions and the ever more effective operations of the libraries and museums. Next, several evolution scenarios are presented and analyzed. A virtual excursion into digital galleries of several cultural institutions all over the world concludes the presentation.