What are the characteristics of a new model for our university museums? To begin my discussion, I quote from a description of "Communicating University Museums: Awareness and Action - University Museums Today" the theme of our 2005 University Museum and Collections (UMAC) Conference, Uppsala, Sweden.

"To meet the future we must convince the world and our university management just how useful the scientific and cultural heritage is ..."

How do we convince the world and our universities about our scientific and cultural importance? To meet the future and to convince our world, we must become more dynamic. The "New Museum" that John Cotton Dana (1999) envisioned is not a static ideal, but an institution in the continual process of reflection, evolution and change. The new models of museums will be dedicated to action. Museums will do more than preserve acts of imagination - they will fuel them. They will incubate changes in society, not just chronicle them. University museums are ideally suited to take on the role of change agents. As change agents, university museums themselves become educational instruments

Sustaining a culture of change and institutional growth, requires and will lead to distinctly different types of relationships between museums professionals, between professionals and their discipline, and most important, between museums and their communities. It will be necessary for professionals to develop cadres and cohorts that interact and intimately share information and techniques in far more detail than at the usual professional conference. Mentoring needs to be revived. Communities and museums must become integral, mutually beneficial and symbiotic. As museums change, the discipline of museum training must include areas such as ethics, law, and managerial techniques (e.g., how to organize and lead a meeting). Without this training, leaders and mangers will waste valuable time with personnel issues, legal concerns, defending the museum's financial position. Ultimately, they will fail.

As indicated by our thematic description, the key to our success will be through our students: "Our success depends upon making our heritage known, visible, accessible and useful to students..." They recognize the problem. The new museums programs for our students must arouse curiosity and encourage research that challenges existing models and seeks alternative approaches. They also must deal with complexity and real life experiences, be dynamic, flexible, resourceful, and knowledgeable, and create students who are better trained and equipped than their predecessors. The professionals who will lead tomorrow's museums will need to be resourceful fundraisers, expert managers, brilliant scholars and excellent communicators.

University museums, with their academic collections and community resources, are ideally suited to be the keys to powerful change (Tirrell 2003). This, too, is indicated in our Conference theme: "University museums are actually at a great advantage due to their immediate access to state of the art technology and knowledge in fields such as IT, pedagogy and museum studies." Museum studies programs, and specifically online programs such as Oklahoma's are in an ideal situation to take command of developing the new models for museums. Why is this so? What is it that online program can do better than other museum studies programs?