The typical museum owns between one and ten different software ‘systems’ to manage and publish its digital content, with each solution designed to solve a single problem, within the institutional digital landscape.

Collections management systems, archive and library management, websites, shops, etc. are all considered as completely independent and self-contained clusters, with none or little communication and exchanges between each other. Data needs to be replicated between different systems and databases and gets quickly out-of-date somewhere down the line, while efforts and costs to integrate different systems increase with each new component. Museums need to start changing their traditional museum perspective, which consists of procuring and purchasing a series of independent and vertical ‘something’ management systems, towards the notion of a framework for integration of information into more holistic digital landscape.