[clwg]

I've known people who have worked in IT in national museum settings, and from what I heard it sounded like a mix of traditional IT support—ensuring the lights stayed on, printers could print, emails and phones worked, and a very simple website stayed online.

Some aspects sounded quite interesting, but these weren't places pushing the envelope in any aspect of technology. I'm sure they were running outdated software and configurations on everything, but IT was closing their tickets and meeting their SLAs. And with no disrespect, these people weren't necessarily disruptors looking to shake up and modernize the museums' infrastructure and take it into the future either, they just did their job to the best of their ability and went home at the end of the day.

To generalize I find that this usually holds true in a lot of non-tech industries, and IT is generally seen as a burdensome cost as opposed to enabler of business.

[graemep]

The British library has pretty complex systems because of the vast size of teh collection. Some pretty interesting stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM