Introduction: On Being Social

In the introduction to the Selected Papers from the first Museums and the Web in 1997, we wrote:
Museums still have much to learn about the potential for using the Web. The prime challenge we face is to move beyond institutional presentation of static pages to enable uses of museum information that are more than just browsing and looking. Truly lively Web sites will reflect an understanding of how people use museum data and permit us to discover what people with appropriate tools would do with museum data if they could. Our next generation of Web sites need to create spaces that support activities ... they need to provide means to integrate information provided by a variety of institutions into packages defined by individual museum visitors. They also need to ensure that the communication enabled by the network is not one way.
(Trant and Bearman, 1997, 2)
Today we can reflect on coming part-way, and on how far we have yet to go ...