Museums and Digital Maturity

Museums and Digital Maturity helps museums to understand why they should assess their digital maturity and explains how to undertake an assessment, even if an institution has a lack of dedicated funding or digital expertise.Informed and influenced by business development models and practices, the book demonstrates how museum professionals can draw upon business language and tools to assess their institution’s digital maturity. Explaining how to select the right tools and resources for assessment; who to involve in the assessment process; and identify what is needed to sustain transformation, Vargas and Burton Jones demonstrate how professionals can adopt a strategy that will assist the cultural institution to master the increasingly complex digital landscape. Taking account of the unique context of each institution, this book does not advocate the use of any one digital maturity assessment. Instead, it helps museums to evaluate the tools and methods, decide what is best for them and then make changes to one area at a time, thereby helping the institution to become more digitally mature.Museums and Digital Maturity includes a series of case studies and prompts that will be useful to practitioners and leaders working in museums around the world. The prompts will help readers to make sense of the concepts discussed within the text and will be particularly useful to students engaged in the study of museums, heritage and arts management.

Lauren M. Vargas is an independent researcher and strategist specializing in digital transformation, community engagement, and strategic foresight in the cultural sector. She is the Founding Principal of Your Digital Tattoo, a consultancy and research practice that supports mission-based organizations in navigating continuous change through inclusive and regenerative methods, systems thinking, and futures literacy. Her work critically examines how digital technologies intersect with institutional values, civic participation, and collective imagination.Vargas currently serves as Head of Research Practice for the Future Museum initiative, a two-year international action research programme supporting over 40 cultural organizations in exploring the futures of institutional value, digital infrastructure, audience development, and cross-sector collaboration. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leicester’s Institute of Digital Culture, where she contributes to research on digital maturity, leadership, and organizational capability across the museum and heritage sectors.Her professional background spans over twenty years across public, private, and academic sectors, including senior roles at Aetna, Fidelity Investments, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Vargas was named one of the top 25 social business leaders by The Economist Intelligence Unit. She holds a Ph.D. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Open University.Based in the Netherlands, Vargas brings a transdisciplinary and international perspective to her work, combining research, consultancy, and pedagogy to support ethical, inclusive, and futures-oriented digital practices in cultural institutions.Katherine Burton Jones is the Program Director and Research Advisor of the Museum Studies program at Harvard University Extension School, USA. Her current research interests include the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to museum databases. Her recent work addresses issues such as deaccessioning, visitor engagement, inclusive collections description, and using museum data to provide insights about climate change. She is the co-editor of Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums (Routledge, 2007). In addition to her academic work, she is the principal of Katherine Jones Consulting, which specializes in strategic and technology planning for higher education and nonprofit organizations, including museums.