GLAM INTERFACES IN 2050

Imagining futures for cultural institutions in the year 2050 requires us to stoke the furnaces of historical narrative. In 1889, curator GB Goode of the Smithsonian Institution delivered an anticipatory lecture titled “The Future of the Museum” in which he said this future entity would “stand side by side with the library and the laboratory.” Over a century later, Goode’s vision has been realized by the liquidity of digital data, which sees galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) converging and now reconciled as information providers in a networked world. Media theorists have described this world-order as “database logic,” whereby the physical assets of cultural