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paul lowe on 19 Sep 10Writing in 1992 about technology in museums, Bearman neatly summarizes a profound shift in museums' perception of their mission, which has only accelerated since then with the explosion of the Internet and the World Wide Web . This shift has inevitably placed stress on the curator's central role in the museum. Not that they weren't already under fire on many fronts, from issues of omniscient authority in a postmodern age of multiple meanings to accusations of parsimonious gatekeeping to the challenges of communicating difficult ideas and complex research to a "general audience" (which usually means a lot of very different audiences with specific needs and often-entrenched points of view). Regardless of how the curatorial role is defined, however, the Net in particular and interface culture in general introduce interesting and perhaps profound opportunities, which might also be perceived as competitive pressures in the culture arena quite old but stil interesting