Multimedia Practices in Corporate Museums: Tribute to Fashion or Canon Transformation

Abstract

In the framework of the project “Scaling social memory of generations in ‘historically’ and ‘newly’ industrialized cities” we have studied various organizations associated with commemoration work. We have interviewed people and have had excursions in various museums: school museums, town museums, local history museums, and corporate museums. All in all, we have visited 11 corporate museums in several cities of Ural region. Certainly, now the best equipped museums are corporate museums of economically booming plants. They are supplied with state-of-the-art equipment that allows them to create fundamentally new expositions, change the traditional canon of the exhibition and storage of museum collections. Nevertheless, not all corporate museums follow this route, there are some which maintain traditional practices of housing exhibits. How do corporate museums of towns and cities of the Ural region work today? How would museum staff like to change their work with regard to use of multimedia technologies?