# Virtual Reality in Museums: Exploring the Experiences of Museum Professionals
## 4 Departments/Teams Handling VR in Museums and Digital Strategies
### Departments and Teams  
The application of VR in museums is a challenging task, requiring a variety of expertise and an interdisciplinary team dedicated to the development of such applications. This proved a challenge for museum professionals, since most museums either do not have a specialized department as such or have departments with a variety of responsibilities that lay in the digital sphere. The variety of managerial approaches regarding the application of new technologies and VR is also evident in the practices followed by the museums participating in this research.  
In 13 cases, a single department handles VR and other technology-enhanced projects. For example, museum 1 has a \"Digital Innovation and Technology Services Department\" that \"works on strategy, concept, design, and implementation of interactive experiences\". In another example (museum 5), the \"Interpretation and Design\" department, which includes a Public Engagement Technologies officer, oversees such initiatives, illustrating an interconnection between the use of new technologies and new audiences engagement. In the case of museum 8, the \"External Affairs and Digital Strategies\" is the responsible department, while museum 4 has an \"Information Management Unit\" focusing on digital collection management and 3D modelling. In some cases, these departments have varied responsibilities and the creation of technology-enhanced exhibits falls under the wider umbrella of digital experiences (also including social media and online presence) or even marketing.  
In four cases the introduction of VR is the result of collaborations and synergies between different departments and teams. For example, in museum 2, several departments are collaborating for the implementation of emerging technologies across the institution: The Technology, Exhibitions, Collections, and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) teams. Thus, what professionals strongly emphasize is the imperative need for collaboration across different teams for developing such projects:  
_\"I think the immersive technologies sits with the digital department as a sort of natural extension of what we do online. But it also sits with our interpretation colleagues as a natural extension of what they do in the galleries. So, this is about two departments having to work closely together to deliver something using this new technology\"_. (Interviewee 16)  
Despite these intra-departmental synergies, many museums are struggling to cope with the needs arising, due to the lack of personnel and the necessary funds to expand their personnel, emphasizing that \"the need for a dedicated team is growing\" (Interviewee 12). Due to these increased needs, in the last years two of the participating museums started to form dedicated labs experimenting with the abilities of VR and other emerging technologies.  
All the above illustrate that a new setting is beginning to emerge in the museum sector due to the rapid advancement of VR and other emerging technologies: dedicated departments or labs are formed, new managerial structures are needed to support the collaboration of different teams in each museum, and additional personnel is needed with new skill sets. As [PERSON] notes, \"embracing networked culture would require a very different outlook and skill set for museum professionals, where the current organization still defines the break between curatorial knowledge holders and technical media skills, the future museum needs to be of the network itself\" [12] (p. 9).