I’m at Museums and the Web 2018 as I write this, and a lot of people who used to be at this conference aren’t at this conference. I don’t have numbers on this, but qualitatively, it sure feels like the musetech sector is shrinking, with 2018 being a particularly brutal year so far for departures. A lot of us at this conference are all asking the same question: why is this happening?

There are certainly a lot of immediately personal reasons for a lot of the departures, and the usual culprits (overwork, inadequate pay/recognition/development opportunities, etc.) are certainly present, but the numbers of people leaving, and the prominence of their roles, leads me to wonder if there’s something more systemic going on. Is there something happening generally at the sector level that’s influencing the decisions of individuals to leave?

Was the expansion temporary?

My first thought was that perhaps this is just natural. The story of musetech over the last ten years has been a story of constant expansion; more new digital roles being hired, more (and larger) digital teams.



I think many of us probably assumed that this expansion would continue indefinitely. Perhaps this is not the case. Perhaps that expansion was just a temporary one that was necessary to get us to where we are now, and now that we’ve arrived at our destination, so to speak, we’re shedding staff.

I think there’s some support for this even just as I look around at the kinds of projects we’re showing at MW this year. VR has come up, as it always does, as the Next Big Tech Thing, and we’re looking at it Very Seriously, mostly out of a learned habit of hunting for big transformational projects. But VR remains a fantasy for all but the largest of museums, and so the scope of the projects that we’re really working on is much smaller. We’re focusing on the details. We made a big push, and now we’re starting to focus on the backlog of debt that we took on during that period. That’s significant, necessary work, but

📌 Is the museum technology sector shrinking? (Anupgarh)
🏢 Koven J. Smith Consulting
📍 Anupgarh