Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, the role of education became increasingly prominent at major American museums, not eclipsing the curator's role but often becoming the most visible and public feature of museum exhibition and administration. The educational mission of museums has enlarged in a track parallel to the development of computer technology. All of the major and many of the minor museums in the United States and the United Kingdom have Internet sites that provide varying degrees of viewer access and supporting research to so-called "virtual collections" that may not be on exhibit in the museum venue; the need for reliable scholarship from educators in a variety of disciplines touching on a museum's art and artifacts may be inferred. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has undertaken a digitization project for museum materials as well as development of guidelines for academic use of such media at colleges (Giral & Dixon, 1996). The Getty is also involved in deve

Eisner, E. W., & Dobbs, S. M. (1986). Museum education in twenty American art museums. Museum News, 65, 42-49.

In much the same vein, Forster-Hahn (1995) describes the increased critical attention to the social and political implications of collecting and presentation of art and artifacts in ways that shape knowledge and perception, and a decline in the emphasis on analyzing the art per se as an object of knowledge. Using examples from the history of national museums and expositions, Forster-Hahn characterizes curators/museum directors as agents of meaning and mission as much as custodians of artifacts and aesthetics, with social and political agency the more compelling subject for contemporary (postmodern) critics than the artifacts themselves. Social, financial, and political concerns external to the museum venue may impinge on the educational experience, whether exhibitions adapt to or deliberately challenge such concerns.

Lewis, R., Nason, J. D., Wright, R. K., Combs, D. J., Muscat, Ann M. (1994, May-June). New curator. Museum News, 73, 40-43; 57-64.

Williams, B. L. (1997, Fall). Recent changes in museum education with regard to museum-school partnerships and discipline-based art education. Visual Arts Research, 23, 83-88.

Alexander, V. D. (1996, January). Pictures at an exhibition: Conflicting pressures in museums and the display of art. The American Journal of Sociology, 101, 797-811.

Malaro, M.C. (1994). Museum governance: Mission, ethics, policy. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.