Museums that were unable to host visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic turned the crisis of disconnection from visitors into an opportunity by using technologies such as social media, VR, and robots. In addition, museums envision a ‘metaverse’ that can communicate and expand the obscure museum space to an infinite virtual space, and a museum that can provide a variety of museum experiences by hyper-connecting and hyper-personalizing it with AI. At the same time, museums are researching ways to transform themselves into cultural and artistic institutions that realize more inclusive values and open a sustainable future. Visitors, including the digital-native MZ generation and AI-native Alpha generation, are also getting evolved with these technologies. However, the reality of the university museum, which has to integrate digital technology and collections and communicate with evolving visitors, is not easy.
This thesis considered the direction that university museums should go, aiming for inclusive values, despite the current difficult reality of the times. The concept of an inclusive museum, which is the background of this orientation, was summarized. In addition, this paper examined the exhibition of the Ewha Womans University Museum, which realized the inclusive value of the museum and looked for experiments by allowing visitors to participate in various ways and combining the participation results and collections with various technologies. These exhibitions are the crowd curation exhibition “You are invited as a curator”, the exhibition curation recommendation model “We Will Recommend a Special Exhibition Curated for You” (2017), and the outdoor exhibition “Connecting from the Street: Traditional and Contemporary Utopia Connecting to AR” (2022).
“Visitor literacy” is important along with “digital transformation” for university museums that must respond to the flow of the digital era and the pandemic era. In order to realize inclusive value, university museums should have the ability to induce participation of visitors to communicate with them and create various opportunities for cooperation through their wisdom and digital technology. If university museums continue to develop literacy and communicate with the cultural community based on the expertise they have accumulated so far, it will be the only strength of university museums that link museums and collections centered on visitors.