Holding the Museum in the Palm of Your Hand Susan Hazan
Holding the Museum in the Palm of your Hand Susan Hazan Introduction: the quintessence of the museum Google Art Project and Europeana: background Transmitting tangibility; the essence of the embodied gallery and the physical object Disseminating intangibility; the descriptive qualities of textural metadata Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 scenarios Conclusion: the loss and the gain Introduction: the quintessence of the museum When we visit a library or archive, we typically expect to find printed material, books, publications and documents. However, when we go to a museum – either in person or online – we expect a very different kind of experience. The physical museum invites us to discover exceptional and often extraordinary kinds of objects, and accordingly, when these very same objects are delivered online, they are managed very differently from the way books are managed by libraries, or the way that archives manage hierarchal documents. As the footprint of the physical museum, an online museum is therefore orchestrated to convey the singular and often spectacular nature of the objects, as well as the very quintessence of the physical museum. This means that as objects, and works of art make their screen debut, the website needs to communicate not only the physicality of the objects but also to signify - in some way - the embodied space of the gallery. As if we have just passed through the physical front door of the museum, the electronic portal signifies entrance to the online museum, setting up the collections accordingly. Objects are not simply displayed as clutches of atomized objects, but are arranged in thematic order – as a collection or exhibition – according to a chronological logic, historical narrative, provenance, or according to artists or schools of art, just in the same way that they are presented in the physical museum1.
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