Educational material on paper can easily be turned into educational resources on a Web site from which they can be downloaded or printed, including even audio and video documents. In many cases, educational activities in interactive workshops would be difficult to reproduce on paper; however, they may be turned into interactive digital experiences that facilitate the understanding of complex phenomena through games or intellectual challenges.

The digital interactive resources represent a progression of mechanical resources created in centres such as Exploratorium in the 1970s and 80s, which were developed mainly in science and technology museums, known as Hands-On museums, that offer:
1. Manual interactivity or challenging emotion (Hands on)
2. Mental interactivity or intelligible emotion (Minds on)
3. Cultural interactivity or cultural emotion (Hearts on)

These days we have the advantage that children are accustomed to the digital environment, in which they habitually play (e.g., with game consoles). The possibility exists of creating fantasy virtual environments and iconographies made to measure for each age-group. Insofar as these interactive games have scripts linked with children's school learning, the educational potential is even greater. Hence, it is important for educationalists and teachers to coordinate their efforts as co-authors of these digital resources.

When we speak of education we are referring not just to children and young people, but also to continuing education for adults. Few resources have been devoted to this age group, who have their own interests and personal agenda, and who can become excellent learners in both analogue and digital environments.

These days museum educational departments are starting to deal with new kinds of public. Older people, for example, who now have more free time and good health to enjoy cultural activities, may have difficulty interacting with computers. Any simplification of menus or improvement in accessibility and visual clarity will smooth their visit. The arrival and integration of immigrant sections of the community also obliges museums to adapt their discourse and educational material to a new public. Finally, specialists who come to the museum may need a tailor-made visit.
To design such tailor-made visits, technology may prove a valuable tool. All sorts of mobile devices (mobile phones, iPods, PDAs, etc.) could replace sound guides to become multimedia guides to suit any public, even taking account of people with disabilities and those who use different languages. Insofar as museums take advantage of these technologies to better serve their diverse public, they can become more all-embracing.
In Spain, one of the best examples is Educathyssen (http://www.educa-thyssen.org/), an educational unit within the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza which has specialised in cybermuseology that takes account of the diversity of their public. Apart from online interactive resources, Educathyssen has sought to create virtual communities, which encourage the public to participate in connection with some exhibition, course or lecture.
The idea of public participation through the Internet is linked with the new concept of the social Web, or Web 2.0, a term coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2004. Web programming makes it possible for visitors to contribute to the creation of content by way of interfaces such as wikis or blogs. Little of this has so far been adopted by heritage institutions, but we may look forward to the time in the future when the public itself will help to extend knowledge of the museum.

How museum staff are affected

Insofar as information and communication technologies offer added value for their work, allowing them to reduce the time spent on mechanical tasks and providing more options for communication and education, museologists will accept their introduction.

The introduction of information technology by heritage institutions must take account of the human resources they have available. At the moment, one extra duty for their staff is the digitalization of their collections, not only of objects but also associated images, videos and audio recordings. In general, such digital cataloguing is very widespread, and content may even be exported directly to a Web site (e.g., DOMUS programme, Museum Plus). However, there are few working examples, the issue of XML schemata is not being considered, and nor are cross-platform formats.
In the case of dissemination via the Internet, the problem with museum portals is their daily management, which cannot depend constantly on technicians to update their content. For some years Content Management Systems (CMS) have been more widely used. These programs make it possible to manage organised Web sites by means of a database, with a series of integrated functions that range from an image gallery to blogs, chats, agendas, news items, language management, etc. A programmer creates the structure and format of the CMS template, and the museum staff can manage the Web-site content through the database.
Currently, experiments are being made in the transformation of content suitably labelled in XML, so that it can be used by a variety of applications/platforms and may become part of a Web portal, a DVD, a catalogue on paper, a PDA guide, etc. Now, while this may seem simple at the level of objects, when it is attempted to apply it to narratives the issue becomes much more complex.

For further information about studies evaluating IT in cultural dissemination contexts, see http://oliba.uoc.edu/aracne.