What is a museum 2.0?

"It is no longer justifiable, however, for museums to claim the pressures to get on the Internet, and the speed with which this has to happen, as an excuse for our failure to engage museological discussion about the museum web phenomenon."

To an extent, the thrust of her argument can be summed up (in the sense of organizing significant vectors of research) in a diagram borrowed from George Hein's work on the constructivist museum (1995).

Hein's summary of museum types based on approaches to learning in the educational literature

Overall, Teather argues strongly for greater people-orientation in museology in general as well as a fluid notion of the museum, which is as much about process and relationships as discrete objects or ideas.

Thus, it is in the personal experience of museums that the essence of the museum lies. The museum as idea then can rest in the museum that you make in the corner of your house, in the eight-columned imitation of a Greek temple, or indeed on the web in a virtual museum or of a museum virtually represented. The museum then exists in a triad of modes -- object, meaning, and personhood. It is in the interrelationship of these that the museum exists and this multiplicity of functions knits the variety of views about museums together into a dialectical argument that reasserts itself again and again over time. Perhaps it is time to reject false oppositions and accept the ambiguity of the museum definition as human and social form that has its own permanence and longevity, that is inherently about things, ideas and people and their interrelationships.
(Teather, 1998)

This broader museological definition, even if it doesn't mesh exactly with accredidation guidelines for museums, is a much more interesting--and liberating--basis from which to think about the virtual.