People can communicate with each other, but they can't touch each other. Museums can communicate the visual, audio, and textual aspect of their collections to people without any need for the people to be physically present. This creates an environment where works of art and artifacts can be spread worldwide for a very broad audience to see, greatly extending the boundaries of the museum. Harry S. Parker, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco sees digitized collections as helpful tools for museums. In the broad sense, technology offers enormous opportunities for museums.
Digital imagery flows so easily around the world.
But there's a catch. An image on a paper-based Polaroid snapshot is physical. An image on a photo CD-ROM or the Web is digital. To get the one to the other requires a great deal of work, and it generally isn't cheap. Despite the cost, museums have a good deal of impetus to get digitized.