Reinventing Museums in a Broadband Environment

Over the last ten years, the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum in Chicago has rebuilt its physical struct~~re from the ground up. During this time it has also embarked on numerous parallel endeavors to fully exploit this rebuilding process electronically. These include the creation of an extremely capable electronic infrastructure, a very highspeed electronic connection to the outside world, and exploratory work in displaying gallery content electronically. In addition, Adler's education department was reorganized to emphasize the creation of electronic programs and content, while partnerships with NASA and the Department of Education were established to create a center for space science education where all these efforts merge. Given the profound changes in the museum world that relatively low-speed Internet connectivity has fostered since its inception, the Adler has embraced the assumption that high-speed connectivity will be ubiquitous in upcoming years and that this levcl of connectivity will profoundly alter the museum's role in formal and informal education. In informal education it will make possible galleries with exhib~t content changing over time. allowing for new discoveries to be addressed and a depth of content over the life of the gallery not possible with traditional museum approaches. Broadband connectivity will expand the role of museums in formal education, allow the rich content of museums to be delivered directly into the classroom, supporting and enriching classroom instruction. As we work to begin to fill the space with meaningful content on an ongoing basis, we are finding that creating the gallery has been the easy part, and that large-scale electronic content creation for a gallery like this has profound and far-reaching implications for the staffing and operation of the entire museum.