Since part of the mission of museum publishing is to produce great, big, beautiful books, June’s D.C.–based National Museum Publishing Seminar, “Print and the Digital Network,” offered anachronisms and anomalies galore. Most of the seminar’s sponsors are high-end European and Far Eastern printers like Mondadori and CS Graphics. They declared that the illustrated, printed exhibition catalogue will be around for a long time.
Nevertheless, the museum publishing business has been greatly affected by advances in web technology. Museum-owned material that was once rarely viewed by the public is now accessible via the web. Therein lie many problems. Since the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1960s, which meant government dollars for the arts and led to the “invention” of the blockbuster exhibition, print publications have literally grown exponentially. With advances in printing and the decline of the costs of color reproduction, documenting and cataloging of museums’ own collections has become a mega printing industry, with books getting larger and larger (and heavier and heavier). The seminar focused on how to move print to the web (in books, marketing, and sales); how to get visitors to museums’ websites—and then to the museums themselves; and how to facilitate digital workflows and web design.
A project originated and partially funded by the Getty Foundation, the Getty Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, allows participating museums (ten at last count) to build a highly developed scholarly infrastructure and searchable database sample materials (a Rauschenberg painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; an out-of-print book on 17th-century Dutch painting at the National Gallery of Art).
As e-reading devices become more sophisticated (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is already optimizing its web pages for the iPad), questions arise surrounding the conversion of materials. Should there be a POD component? How to clear rights and reproductions for electronic uses when works are not part of a museum’s permanent collection? And then there’s the single greatest rights hurdle—artworks by a living artist, including film and performance art. In addition, curatorial involvement and the role of the museum director in the publishing process remain a constant issue.
The Met’s ten-year-old Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (TOAH), presented by founding project manager Teresa Lai, represents how huge these projects can be. The Met has a collection of 2 million objects, but so far curators have selected only 6,500 to appear in the TOAH, along with 900 separate thematic essays. The TOAH is a major resource, receiving over 11 million hits a year and 150,000 cut-and-pastes each week, but it is not currently connected to the Met’s content management update system (though it will be in a few months) and most visitors find it via Google or Wikipedia, not directly from the Met’s website.
Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian, quoted a web consultant who warned, “You’ve got about three years before you become a room full of stuff on the mall” if you don’t do something to open up your museum to the new. It is possible for TOAH to become interactive, though the system is currently closed. But as a two-way conversation means giving up curatorial authority, the curators must be in agreement. At many levels, we are not there yet.
Cloud computing and web security were briefly touched on, along with the costs of digitizing material and the prospect of changing digital standards. The Library of Congress’s Director of Publications, Ralph Eubanks, explained that due to these changing standards, the LOC had to rescan a large number of images for downloading, use in books and brochures etc. The LOC does not store all of its material in the cloud, because it does not consider the security sufficient.
The New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan and Modern Art Notes blogger Tyler Green urged their audience to stop “lurking” and interact and participate, “make an intervention and make a contribution” to grasp the spirit of the internet. Museums must actively engage in drawing the public to their websites, and should also make a greater push to syndicate their content on websites like Yahoo!, Green said. Think a daily Twitter feed, “why this work of art is important today” in no more than 140 characters. And don’t underestimate the audience for art. When writing for the web, “don’t dumb down, just realize who the audience is and say what needs to be said in precisely the number of words required,” recommended Mike Spiegel, a freelance creative director who recently gave the National Geographic website its first redesign in twelve years.
