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In the few minutes at my disposal, I will touch on both current and impending opportunities and challenges facing art museums as primary "content providers" in the electronic age. Let me be clear about a couple of matters at the outset: I am an unreconstructed connoisseur in a world of intellectual relativism, an adherent to the belief that an art museum is primarily a place to encounter original works of art, and only secondarily a bazaar, eatery, and nightclub. It should, in my antiquated view, exist to champion authenticity and originality in a world gone mad with simulacra of cultivation and the substitution of soundbites for insights. Furthermore, I don't consider information technology to be a panacea for what ails museums. If a collection is modest in size or quality, a networked computer won't help that.
As larger museums struggle to connect disparate departments with competing philosophies, conservative attitudes about the information age, and other demands on the institution for its survival, the results have been slow and usually less innovative than at smaller institutions. By way of example, the Krannert Art Museum of the University of Urbana- Champaign in Illinois was arguably the first in the nation to explore the potential of MOSAIC, the compelling new multimedia program available over the Internet. The Krannert simply posted a so-called home page on the Internet with attractive color photographs of its exterior and a few objects in the collection, and was followed by other larger institutions, but only slowly. Even today, the National Museum of American Art and the Dallas Museum of Art are the only large American art museums using the Internet broadly for image dissemination, while a host of smaller museums have feistily begun probing the potential of this new friendly interface.
The intellectual property of art museums need not be handled exclusively by highly paid cogitators. At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would like to acquaint you with some of the digital goings-on at the Carlos Museum. Some days ago, a nineteen-year old was in our Exhibition Design Studio in Atlanta, merging images through Adobe Photoshop with a virtual reality program called Virtus Walkthrough, and configuring, with the review of our chief designer, a 3-D walkthrough of our upcoming exhibitions. This same student helped us prepare a 3-D tour of an exhibition planned for the Olympics, and by dropping digitized images at a cost of 90 cents per image into a Photo-CD and then transferring them into an inexpensive software program, we produced a demo that was presented to the Atlanta City Council and won an in- kind grant towards the exhibition, worth well over a hundred thousand dollars. We now plan to offer upcoming exhibitions to corporations and foundations in this way via CD-ROM, and the NEH is interested in setting up a mechanism so that shows can be reviewed in this way by peer panels in the future. The next step is for museums to offer visitable exhibitions to each other over the Internet, and that day is coming sooner than we can imagine.
The bookshop is beginning to market our published titles online, and to receive orders by E-mail. We ultimately hope to eliminate expensive mailer-order flyers entirely, and provide an online service for direct sales by electronic means, or E-cash, without printing costs. More dramatically still, we are finding that producing a CD-ROM instead of a softcover exhibition catalogue may be cost-effective, and are producing our first electronic catalogue this spring at a cost of under $20,000. We are able to keep production cost down, I hasten to add, by using a neighboring university's multimedia lab and the time and talent of its undergraduates and graduate students. Our sales projections are predicated on the following observations: if three to five percent of exhibition-visiting Americans, on average, buy catalogues, the market is far too small to be profitable for a museum our size. But if we can tap into an even smaller percentage of the some 18 million and growing CD-ROM owners eager for enriching content, we'll be more effective than ever at publishing scholarship.
The next logical step, of circumventing shrink-wrapped technology like CD-ROMs, and publishing online, is already on the horizon. In one week we will launch a new interactive service by means of MOSAIC -- again, a freeware product available to any of you -- which will allow our members to pull down the newsletter on their home computer, kids in our kids club to do interactive puzzles and get a bounce-back view of the correct completed puzzle, members to comment on the Museum via E-mail into a cyberspace comment book, staff to be available by means of a color image of the staff in each department at work in the conservation lab, design studio, curatorial offices, and so on, accompanied by a descriptive paragraph of their duties, E-mail address, a bi-weekly auditorium with a member of the staff, and a dozen other exciting features including illustrated exhibition and program previews and sound clips for upcoming concerts at the Museum.
Our next step will be to offer those members who are on
the Internet an
improved electronic service, for which we will charge at
least as much as a
current membership, but at a fraction of the current cost to
us. They will have
a monthly forum with me in an electronic auditorium as an
incentive to be
eco-friendly, and may elect to cease receiving printed
material from the
museum. Our printing and postage costs will progressively
drop, while we
anticipate growth in membership -- including members from
all over the globe.
Our university's technology division confirmed that over
15,000 users from 33
countries have logged onto our MOSAIC program in the last
three months -- and
we therefore plan to introduce 'virtual memberships' to
those outside of a
200-mile radius at a reduced rate. Microsoft and Visa have
already struck a
deal to inaugurate electronic-cash soon. Once
E-cash
becomes the preferred
method of payment, we may be in a position to attract a
small percentage of
those users to join the Museum if we can continue to
innovate in
this
field.
The Museum's greatest intellectual property challenges will surface next year with an initiative to provide, via MOSAIC, access to our image database, so that anyone can pull down a 256-color image from our permanent collection and browse the storerooms, as well as pull down video, voice- over, and animation. We will be adding incrementally to what is offered over the Internet -- we currently have 70 images uploaded -- as we work out the thorny issue of site licensing, instead of object-by-object permissions. Instead of viewing publishing as the production of large and expensive catalogues which are instantly outdated and decreasingly consulted, we plan to publish in a way that can be continuously updated if the spirit moves us. Again, none of this requires a large multimedia budget. The costs are dropping fast, and the talent pool is widening as college students weaned on video games are training for a profession which is only in its embryonic stages.
The primary obstacle to art museums online is not technological but legal. The MUSE Educational Media group here in New York is at work to resolve the primary challenges to the next two phases of information technology in art museums: the protection of intellectual property rights in CD-ROMs and online. CD-ROMs are likely to be the Betamaxes of the 1990's. So let's move on to my last task, which is to tell you about an exciting pilot project soon to be launched, called the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, which is also under the auspices of MUSE Educational Media, and has been embraced by AAM and AAMD.
Online publishing is a new area; currently we lack most of what we need: standards for image description, resolution, and security, or for accessing digitized museum material through academic networks. While slides are costly to duplicate, digital images can be easily, cheaply and accurately replicated in endless multiples. This technological difference requires new licensing paradigms to protect and compensate copyright holders in distributing their works over a network, since object-by-object permissions will be impossible to keep up with. The networked distribution of museum material with associated descriptive data is an entirely new way to make museum collections available for study, research and enjoyment. The potential variety and quantity of content providers and users argues for developing an efficient administrative, legal and financial framework to simplify the process of distributing and retrieving information.
Unfortunately, some universities are beginning to digitize museum material without prior approval, which may hinder reaching agreements with rights holders on terms and conditions of use. Impending lawsuits will only delay widespread academic use of digitized museum content, as well as access to vast amounts of material in museum storage. Several museums are already requesting funding for digitization from funding sources -- and those sources, from the NEH to private foundations, have begun to declare a hiatus in sponsoring such projects until several issues are resolved. Before significant funds are spent on well-intentioned but stand-alone projects, image and documentation standards should be developed that will support continued and future use of digitized images. Participants should be able to design mutually acceptable solutions through this Site Licensing Project. Museums, colleges and universities are natural "digital" partners who share many common interests, as well as complementary skills. They would both benefit from efficient administrative mechanisms to distribute museum-provided images and text. Digitization of high-quality images would let museums play a new role as electronic lending libraries, loaning images of paintings, sculptures, prints and archives to students and faculty in countless academic locations, stimulating awareness of the location of works and thereby encouraging visitation.
Museum and educational institutions will thus participate in a structured two-year test process to explore systematically various network distribution techniques, approaches to image security, and academic applications of museum materials in order to build efficient administrative mechanisms. Common test data and analytical review techniques will yield accurate comparisons of diverse systems at different test sites. Test results should be the basis for developing standards of academic access and use guidelines to be incorporated in site licenses.
Legal issues need clarification based upon actual situations. Most legal commentators do not believe that "fair use" will provide a sufficient legal basis for students and faculty to use electronic images of museum-owned material with anything approaching the levels of contemplated use. Furthermore, the new technology has potential academic applications that are outside the scope of previous "fair use" guidelines. The general uncertainty about electronic rights requires a prominent test to help sort out the issues. An academic test involving a substantial number of images is an ideal context for educational users and content-owners to explore relevant legal issues, and to test solutions without relying on the courts.
So we've glimpsed some aspects of information technology in art museums. I suspect that this barely charted territory is intimidating to most of us, unless we're a bit cavalier, and yet the only alternative to grappling with this technology ourselves is to be helped along by commercial entities with a secondary interest in art education and appreciation. We certainly appear to be temptingly byte-sized for many multimedia conglomerates, but I am hopeful that we can manage our own fates to avoid being gobbled up by waves of content-seekers. So, however reluctant museums may be to dip our toes into the electronic ocean for fear of shock, I think it is in our best interests to do so, and AAMD will try to be one of those organizations to provide protective gear for the swim.