Digital Inequality in Cultural Institutions

Cultural institutions like museums and galleries often frame ‘digital’ as an opportunity to facilitate access, inclusion, and participation, but this digital work is not available to all.

What do cultural institutions need to do digital work— and what happens when those needs go unmet?
Contemporary cultural policy positions digital transformation as a democratic enterprise: a path toward greater access, inclusion, and participation. But this book shows that the reality is far more uneven.

Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic research with more than 100 cultural institutions across Australia—including First Nations art centres, community archives, museums, and galleries—Holcombe-James demonstrates that the capacity to do digital work is not equally distributed. It falls along familiar lines of geography, institutional scale, and funding, reproducing and deepening existing inequalities across the sector.

Using the concept of digital capital, this book reveals how infrastructures, capabilities, and relationships combine to enable or constrain institutional digital transformation. Holcombe-James argues that addressing digital inequality requires moving beyond policy approaches that place the burden on individual institutions, toward collective and collaborative responses—shared infrastructures, distributed expertise, and sector-wide knowledge building. A vital resource for scholars and practitioners alike, this book reframes how we think about digital transformation in cultural policy, putting questions of equality and access at the centre.