Museums today find themselves within a mediatised society, where everyday life is conducted in a data-full and technology-rich context. In fact, museums are themselves mediatised: they present a uniquely media-centred environment, in which communicative media is a constitutive property of their organisation and of the visitor experience. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication explores what it means to take mediated communication as a key concept for museum studies and as a sensitising lens for media-related museum practice on the ground.

Including contributions from experts around the world, this original and innovative Handbook shares a nuanced and precise understanding of media, media concepts and media terminology, rehearsing new locations for writing on museum media and giving voice to new subject alignments. As a whole, the volume breaks new ground by reframing mediated museum communication as a resource for an inclusive understanding of current museum developments.

The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication will appeal to both students and scholars, as well as to practitioners involved in the visioning, design and delivery of mediated communication in the museum. It teaches us not just how to study museums, but how to go about being a museum in today’s world.

The book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Kirsten Drotner is Professor of Media Studies in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark and founding director of the research programmes Our Museum and DREAM. Author or editor of 30 books, her research interests include media history, media and information literacies, digital creativities, and museum communication. Her most recent book is Museum Communication and Social Media: The Connected Museum (co-edited, Routledge, 2013).

Vince Dziekan is a Senior Academic and Practitioner-Researcher at Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA), Monash University, Australia, whose work engages in an interdisciplinary way with the transformation of contemporary curatorial practices at the intersection of design, creative technology and museum culture. He is the author of Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition (2012); associate editor of Curator: The Museum Journal; and curator of MWX, the exhibition initiative of Museums and the Web.

Ross Parry is Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. A Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he has been a Tate Research Fellow, Chair of the Museums Computer Group, and is one of the founding Trustees of the Jodi Mattes Trust – for accessible digital culture. His works include Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007), Museums in a Digital Age (editor, Routledge, 2009).

Kim Christian Schrøder is Professor of Communication at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark. His books in English include Audience Transformations: Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity (co-edited, 2014), Museum Communication and Social Media: The Connected Museum (co-edited 2013), and Researching Audiences (co-authored, 2003). His research interests comprise the analysis of audience uses and experiences of media. His recent work explores mixed methods for mapping news consumption.