Survival of the most digital?

If our museums were a Dickensian character, who would they be: Miss Havisham stuck in an old wedding dress in a room gathering cobwebs; or Fagin the entrepreneur, sending urchins out to spread his influence across the city?

The second option was favoured by speaker Ross Parry at a recent Question Time style debate at the Science Museum in London – Museums in the information age: evolution or extinction? Organised by the University of Leicester and featuring a panel of thought leaders from the sector, the panel considered how effectively museums are responding to technological developments or whether they are lagging behind.

Museums need to evolve to remain relevant in the age in which they operate, stressed Carole Souter of the Heritage Lottery Fund. That includes engaging with people who can't physically come to the museum, as well as showcasing unseen collections to a broader online audience, with the opportunity for non-experts to contribute their comments.

By his own admission, Ian Blatchford of the Science Museum played the role of old fogey, agreeing with the principle of evolving towards a digitally component museum but citing the Dad's Army catchphrase: "Don't panic, Captain Mainwaring." He refuted the notion of digital exhibitions as an equal substitute for real-time museums.

"Digital technology shouldn't burrow away at a museum's core sense of identity as the fundamentals stay the same," he said. "Many of the traditional things museums do, such as scholarship, caring for collections and museum displays, now seem ever more relevant and is reflected in the increasing rise of visitor numbers."

In an age when we are so flooded with information, authenticity and trust matter even more to people, he added – we must not confuse what audiences really want with what we think they ought to want.

It is in a museum's DNA to evolve, argued Dr Ross Parry, academic director and senior lecturer at the University of Leicester's School of Museum Studies. The modern museum has inevitably changed its structure, aspects of its purpose and audience relationships, as well as the intellectual framework used to make sense of its collections – Robert Cotton, Hans Sloan, Henry Cole and Oppenheimer would no longer recognise the museums they helped to create.

According to Ross, the choice we need to make in the digital age is this. Do we hold on to qualities that are defiantly analogue and rely on people being present at a venue, and having to ritualistically cross the threshold to get there as a social encounter that involves us looking mainly at physical objects? Or, do museums choose to change and converge in a digital age where content is distributed, people are networked and everyone can have a voice to create or produce?

Museums could redefine themselves as multi-platform service brands that publish and broadcast, as well as exhibit, he suggested – or will the physical object always spark a stronger spiritual and emotional reaction than digital formats?

Blatchford was quick to thwart what he sees as this myth of real objects, upheld as a sacred creed by curators. "Just because a beautiful object is put on display in a designated space, people will not automatically feel privileged to see it," he said. The digitised drawings of the Charles Babbage archive at the Science Museum are more beautiful and more useful to researchers than the original, he suggested.

Digitisation projects are also helping to break up the cosy clubs that used to exist inside museum archive departments, he added. Now ordinary people can have access to collections, not just the privileged few. Souter agreed, referring to the British Museum's Turning the Pages, which enables visitors to see extraordinary manuscripts close up on screen, online or in a gallery. Nor does multimedia necessarily impoverish the realness of objects, said Ross, citing the success of A History of the World in 100 Objects and the website, The Making of the Modern World.

Museums have been slow to develop in comparison with libraries and are yet to reach a point of radical change, Ross continued. But there have been some big leaps forward, such as the Science Museum's Web Lab project with Google, the UK aggregator Culture Grid, and Europeana, a one-stop shop for searching digital collections across Europe. JISC, NESTA and the AHRC are also supporting ventures.

Blatchford offered a more sober analysis, citing David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old and civilisation's classic error of making neat linear relations between technology and outcomes. Every museum prides itself on having an app project and the accumulative effect amounts to nothing more than a selection of apps, he said.

Souter also cautioned that some digital resources produced by museums quickly become disposable if not easily discoverable by potential users. However, the Heritage Lottery Fund is now willing to invest in digital only projects, she said, as people who do find them will play around and use them in ways we cannot yet imagine.

Matters of money and copyright were also raised in questions from the floor. But in summarising the case for the digital evolution of museums, Ross said museums need to be social (understanding the ecology of the social web), situated (providing location specific content), sensual (blurring the join between physical and digital) and semantic (responding to changing machinery). But, he warned, we must consider the ethical implications and moral consequences too.

A man arrested in the minutes after Kelly’s murder outside his home in Killester, north Dublin, yesterday afternoon was still being questioned today.

While he was arrested on foot on the same street the getaway vehicle was abandoned, Garda sources said he was a distance away from the car when detained and his proximity to the vehicle will not be enough to charge him directly in relation to the murder.

However, he is being questioned about illegal possession of a firearm and membership of an illegal organisation, with a criminal charge on the latter now seen as most likely before his period of detention expires tomorrow.

The man is in his early 30s and is a member of the Real IRA. He has served prison sentences following a number of serious convictions related to his association with the dissident organisation.

The gun used to kill Kelly has still not been recovered and gardaí are now working on the theory that the man under arrest was the getaway driver and not the person who pulled the trigger.

They believe the gunman had escaped the scene on Stiles Court in Clontarf just before a patrol car arrived and uniformed gardaí arrested the suspect who is now in custody.

Detectives have not ruled out the possibility that the gunman took the murder weapon with him after getting out of the getaway car. They also believe the gun may have been discarded in the general location of the killing on Furry Park Road or as the killer and his driver sped down Howth Road before turning in the residential area at Stiles Court.