Killing a culture softly: Corporate partnership with a Russian museum

Information communications technology provides a way on the World Wide Web for national museums to represent the cultural artefacts they house. Framed by the notion of cybercolonization, a colonizing of cultures and cultural institutions by computing ideas, this on-site case study of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia examines computing ideas shaping information communications technology developments within the museum and, particularly, its current IBM sponsored website 〈http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/〉. The paper will illuminate subtle cybercolonizing influences by Global IBM evident in the website structure, design, targeting, esthetic choices, cultural content realignment, IBM corporate e-business underlay, and American English branding. The notion of cyberglocalization, an adapting of global cyber processes to local circumstances, is offered as an avenue to address colonization present in the Hermitage-IBM website. The case study offers museum professionals an illustration of the underlying assumptions about information communications technology (ICT) ideas, interaction, and appearance in the development of museum websites.