An ongoing puzzle is how to present catalogue type information in ways that demonstrate the interest and significance of the objects. Across the spectrum of electronic businesses and organisations, there is collaboration and convergence, vertically and horizontally. Internet service providers, for example, are becoming fewer and larger. Media companies are merging. These trends are seen in the public sector too.
Smaller museums have to work much harder to form a critical mass.
However, collaboration is being encouraged by funding programmes, which increasingly expect bids from groups of museums and other organisations. From the users' viewpoint, co-operation is likely to provide more popular results than specialisation. For example, collections relating to the history of science could be combined with history, or art and design, or military history, or current science, to form a resource with wider appeal than any single subject. The task for museums, if they wish to succeed in the future digital space, is to design strategies that enable them to use the geographical features of this new landscape in pursuit of meeting stakeholder expectations and their own objectives. Stakeholder Expectations Museums notoriously have to play multiple roles.