Shelley Bernstein lives with her computer.
Most days she hunkers down in her spartan office at the Brooklyn Museum where, as chief technology officer, she invents ways to keep people visiting the museum and its Web site, brooklynmuseum.org.
[source: Carol Vogel, New York Times] Every night she bicycles home to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn to be with Teddy, her beloved pit bull, and monitors the institution’s presence on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, FourSquare and Twitter, where it has nearly 183,000 followers.
Some of her projects — letting Web followers watch a 28-foot tepee being built in the museum or inviting them to participate in a coming exhibition by taking a visual art quiz — have led to a flood of invitations to lecture at conferences around the globe.
A decade ago, museum Web sites were little more than online advertisements, displaying an institution’s hours, directions, admission prices and exhibitions. But evolving technology has created new opportunities, and people like Ms. Bernstein are becoming critical players in helping museums exploit them.
Talk to anyone involved with museum technology and the conversation inevitably boils down to one universal word: engagement.
“It’s less about technology and more about what the visitor can bring to the equation,” said Ms. Bernstein, 37, a pixieish woman who answers questions at a rapid-fire speed. “In the end, we want people to feel ownership of this museum. We ask them to tell us what they think. They can give us a bad review; when we make a mistake they can come to our rescue. We want to engage with our community.”
While museums have long strived to be welcoming places as well as havens of learning, social media is turning them into virtual community centers. On Facebook or Twitter or almost any museum Web site, everyone has a voice, and a vote. Curators and online visitors can communicate, learning from one another. As visitors bring their hand-held devices to visits, the potential for interactivity only intensifies.
However, there is a caveat. The new technology is “stimulating, and we’re giving a lot of thought to the amount of information we provide,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But “we’ve got to keep people in a heads-up mode, to make sure they are looking at art.”
As technology and all its tools change, so do the challenges facing museums. Among them: how to install wireless Internet access in old buildings so visitors can use their own devices, how to keep up with the constant demands of social media and, most important, calibrating how much the public should influence what goes on the walls.
Also, not getting too caught up in fads. “Everyone had a pogo stick and a scooter,” Mr. Campbell said. “Now everyone is tweeting.”
The Met built its online timeline of art history in 2000, and the feature has only grown in depth and popularity, attracting more than six million visitors in the last year, officials at the museum said. The entire Web site it is undergoing a redesign to be made public at the end of the summer.
Calling what is going on in museum technology “a frenzy of creativity,” Mr. Campbell said: “Every generation has to find the right modes of communication, and if it helps open doors it’s a good thing.”
The developers of these technologies say there is no such thing as too much information. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art took its famed Matisse painting “Woman With a Hat” off the wall and into a conservation studio, an image of the frame being removed was posted on Facebook. “Suddenly people could have a peek behind the scenes,” said Ian Padgham, the museum’s digital engagement associate. “It’s all about off-the-cuff transparency.”
When he was in Paris in December, Mr. Padgham said, he tracked down locations where artists represented in the museum’s collection had worked. “I was able to find the exact spot where Man Ray took a picture of St. Sulpice,” he said. He took a photograph from the same vantage point and posted it on Facebook along with a link to the original work. The Facebook post was “liked” by 189 people and drew enthusiastic comments calling for more.
At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Web users can track its endowment, its membership, the number of visitors it had that day and even how much energy it is using. “We like to share information with the public, the press and our staff,” said Robert Stein, deputy director for research, technology and engagement at the Indianapolis museum. “It’s an important mission of ours.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web site has a new attraction called “Connections,”where behind-the-scene staff members — including an educator and a media producer — talk about their favorite works in the collection. “It’s a balance between personal and scholarly voices,” said Erin Coburn, the chief officer of digital media at the Met.
The museum produced a “Date Night” segment for Valentine’s Day, with an editorial assistant talking about the most romantic art at the Met. This was posted to Facebook, with the museum asking users to share what they thought were some of the most romantic works. “We wanted to repurpose it in different environments,” Ms. Coburn said. Instantly, hundreds of viewers responded that they “liked” the post.
But while social media has been getting so much attention, Ms. Coburn said, “there is pressure to create more information on our Web site with bigger images, descriptive texts, videos and audio all brought together in one place.”
However, for those who want that “stand-alone piece,” as Ms. Coburn describes it, the museum is introducing applications for mobile devices. The first is for its a current show, “Guitar Heroes: Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York.” Since it was introduced on Feb. 5, more than 40,000 people had downloaded the free iPhone app.
For some museums, Web sites function as the main entrance. Attendance at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2010 was 430,000 visitors, but its Web site had almost one million users who could view the museum’s collections, watch videos and contribute to blogs.
“We have to be relevant on the Web, constantly making our information interesting,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Art Museum. One way, he said, was with what he called the power of “collective thinking.” And so in 2009, the museum created artbabble.org, a Web site that offers videos from institutions around the world. “We started with six partners and now we have 30 around the world,” said Mr. Stein.
The international network of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums gave new meaning to the democratization of art when it started its YouTube Play project last summer. Anyone with a video camera and a computer could vie for a place in its video-art Biennial, which took place in October at all its museums. (The videos were on view in the museums and on YouTube.)
The biennial was so successful — 23,358 submissions from 91 countries and more than 24 million viewers on YouTube — that the Guggenheim is already in discussions with YouTube about the next one. “It gave us the ability to touch people instantaneously,” said Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s chief curator in New York. “And it was an entrance into a medium that was always thought to be low culture but is emerging an art form.”
Public participation is taking different forms at different museums. The Brooklyn Museum’s Web site has a quiz, for example, that will help it shape “Split Second: Indian Paintings,” an exhibition of 10 rarely seen canvases from the museum’s collection that will go on view in July.
But the projects at the Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim are exceptions. Most of what goes on the walls of museums is still carefully organized by scholars. And the goal for all this technology remains getting people through their doors.