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.

The props and cues of the physical museum - catalogs, labels, wall texts and accompanying pamphlets - are presented online as descriptive labels and texts (metadata), serving both to identify the object as well as to maintain the individual object's place within the thematic series. Without these supporting descriptions an object simply gets lost; becomes an orphan; stripped of role in the series and its place in the collection. These textural descriptions serve to discern what it is the user is actually looking at. For example, as much as colors in paintings need to be reproduced with fidelity to accurately convey the quality artwork, so an archaeological object needs to be set in its historical and anthropological context to provide both intelligibility and meaning. The scale of a tiny object or art installation can be misleading when viewed online, and - without a clear indication of dimensions or proportions - the qualities of a collection can actually confound, rather than inspire the visitor. All of these different kinds of information must be made available to the user, including how, and why the object came to the museum in the first place.

1 A derivation of the heterotopian space, according to Foucault, is the heterochronia of time that accumulates indefinitely - for example, museums and libraries. See Hazan (2001), The Virtual Aura - Is There Space for Enchantment in a Technological World? http://www.archimuse.com/mw2001/papers/hazan/hazan.html#ixzz1OPJ5yWsW

1 There are many ways for a museum to persuade us that this is in fact the footprint of the real museum. Websites are branded according to the mother institution, with the provision of practical information about visiting, audio and video guides, introducing online exhibitions, and of course, providing an entrée to the collections themselves.

Even the way the user is conceptualized in this scenario is different. A museum typically calls its 'user' a 'visitor'; thereby strengthening the idea that we are welcomed by the institution into the museum, and, that once inside the museum, we have a distinct role to player – other than 'using' the web pages. The critical difference between terms 'user' and 'visitor' perhaps reflects the difference between information provided (opening hours, ticketing, etc.) and knowledge (the curatorial orchestration of the collections) that the museum is sharing with its visitors online.

This chapter focuses on the user/visitor perspective in a museum scenario with a focus on their online collections. It looks at how visitors who may not be physically able – or even motivated – to go to a museum might be interested to learn about, or take pleasure in viewing the collection made available to him or her at school, at work, or at home. We will investigate two museum-driven projects; the Google Art Project and Europeana; Europe's Digital Library as two very different approaches to delivering cultural content to the screen. Both of these platforms bring museum content into to our every-day lives; whether be it through a website on the computer screen, or through mobile technologies where collections and exhibitions are transported directly into the palm of our hand. In both cases we will look at how content is transmitted when visitors are seeking answers to the 'who, what, when, where' questions and, just as important, we will investigate how the 'wonder' of the object is delivered - the very reason that these kinds of objects are in a museum in the first place.

Google Art Project and Europeana: background

While both the Google Art Project and Europeana deliver cultural content, these two projects have very distinct yet very different visions, and consequently very different user experiences. Europeana has been developed as the gateway to Europe's distributed cultural heritage resources. Content is drawn from 27 member states, and includes books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from national libraries, museums and galleries, archives, libraries, audiovisual collections, and cultural institutions (see the Europeana fact sheet2.

La nascita di Venere, 1483-1485, Sandro Botticelli, 1445-1510, Uffizi Gallery on the Google Art Project

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2 The European Digital Library currently points to more than 17 million objects and facilitates access to texts, images, videos and sound objects, from over 15,000 institutions across Europe3. None of the collections, however, are actually held by Europeana. Ironically this prestigious library, with a recognizable brand does not act as the custodian to these collections, hosting within the portal only a thumbnail preview and the metadata; the textural explanations that describe the objects, or works of art. Through browsing and searching on Europeana, and after discovering the collections, the user is taken out of Europeana to where the rich content resides. Clicking on the link takes the user straight to the content provider's own home page, the actual custodian of the collections that are hosted and maintained by the individual institutions, all fully integrated into Europeana - albeit one click away.

Europeana home page

However, this library is a truly European library. With the aim of providing multilingual access to Europe’s diverse cultural heritage, Europeana currently makes all the main pages, i.e. navigation, search, retrieval and display interfaces, available in all 23 official EU languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish, plus Catalan and Icelandic4. Content, of course, is accessible from all of these countries.

The Google Art Project is an entirely different kind of portal. This ambitious project grew out of Google's 20% policy5, offering their engineers “20-percent time” so that they’re free to work on what – according to Google – their engineers are really passionate about. The Google Art Project invites you to explore museums from around the world, and to view a selection of their collections at high resolution. At the time of writing there are more than a thousand artworks online, with 17 museums taking part in this project, and many, many more museums around the world waiting in the wings to be invited into this prestigious group.

The three main features to the Google Art Project include6:

• A walk-through of the physical galleries using their Street View technology

• The Artwork View, where a single work of art, selected by each museum is offered in high resolution. This is called the Gigapixel Artwork (7 billion pixels), where visitors can zoom into the image and view it over a platform that 'tiles' the work behind the scenes; delivering the breathtaking images tile by tile, almost in microscopic detail.

• A shopping cart/lightbox feature that allows users to select from across the artworks and to bring them together into their own, personalized, collection.

3 Angelaki, G., et al., ATHENA: A Mechanism for Harvesting Europe's Museum Holdings into Europeana . In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2010: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2010. Consulted May 31, 2011,

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Uffizi Gallery at Street View

According to Amit Sood, Head of Art Project, Google:

This initiative started as a ‘20% project’ by a group of Googlers passionate about making art more accessible online. Together with our museum partners around the world we have created what we hope will be a fascinating resource for art-lovers, students and casual museum goers alike - inspiring them to one day visit the real thing7.

According to Europeana, the digital library:

… promotes discovery and networking opportunities in a multilingual space where users can engage, share in, and be inspired by the rich diversity of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage8. In order to clarify the different approaches of these two projects and the impact this has on the user experience, we will look at the way Rembrandt's paintings are staged both on the Google Art Project, and on Europeana to see how they are presented, as well as comparing how the essence of the artwork across both platforms is mediated through the screen to the visitor on the other side of the glass. Both the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg have selected a Rembrandt as their singular work of art with the former choosing the Night Watch, 1642 and the latter the Return of the Prodigal Son, (1663-1665).

the Return of the Prodigal Son, (1663-1665), the Hermitage State Museum, Google Art Project The Hermitage presents its premier work with the full label of the Prodigal Son on the panel to the right of the high-resolution image - 1663-1665, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, 1606-1669, canvas, oil, height 262.00 cm width 205.00 cm, noting its location in Room 254. In addition there is a brief audio clip in Russian and a 25-minute video of the work, also in Russian. We can also read a short/long description of the painting (in English) and can follow the link to view this work on the Hermitage’s own website9. The Google map accompanying this section takes us to Leiden, in the Netherlands where both the birth place and place of death of this artist is indicated. Two more links take us to the other Rembrandts on the Google art Project (currently 23 other paintings) and onto the other objects located in the Hermitage (some 23 paintings, mosaics and sculptures). As an online research tool, this is just about as good as it gets. We can quickly gather the basic information we need about this artwork as well as being able to inspect it in very high resolution. The cross links to other Rembrandts, and to other works in the Hermitage encourage intuitive searches and clearly frame the art in its historical context. In addition, there is a focus on the artist, where each artist's biography is

7 Art Project press release, 1.2.11,

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4 linked to the artwork, and from here you can learn more about each artist through links to Google Scholar10. Each museum has its own section, including a link to museum’s homepage, and a comprehensive floor plan of the entire museum, with a number of galleries highlighted that link to the other artworks selected in the project. This is the Street View route and we move around the galleries as if we are perched on the shoulders of the driver as he winds his way around the galleries at just the right height to catch the paintings and sculptures. This is the magic of the Google Art Project, the sense that we are actually wandering around a real museum and viewing the collections from the best perspective. As each painting comes into view, the next one is just ahead, and unlike a typical visit inside any of these world-class institutions, there are no crowds jostling at our elbows, and no pesky tourists obscuring our view of the masterpieces. All the museums, however, on the Google Art Project look exactly the same as they are built from an identical template, and until we begin to inspect the artworks and read the texts, it is not always clear which museum we have just landed in. At the Hermitage, the Google map shows the location of the museum, with additional sections describing the history of the institution and furnishing further information about the museum. The last link takes you again to the other works in the Hermitage. But with 17,000 paintings and 600,000 graphic works in the collections, and over 12,000 sculptures, 300,000 works of craft, 700,000 archeological and 1,000,000 numismatic findings in the Hermitage - according to the information supplied here - the Google Art Project ‘s 23 objects represents a very small percentage of the whole collection. One can only hope that this is an excellent start to what could be an incredible resource, but clearly the man-hours required to upload all of the Hermitage’s collections into such a rich environment would indeed be a truly formidable task.

At the same time, a search for Rembrandt on Europeana produces 5,916 results. This includes texts, (108), images (5,790), videos (15) and sounds (3). Limiting the search just to the Netherlands we find 447 images and 2 videos. As you type in the term ‘Rembrandt’ you are prompted to check similar terms: rembrandtplein rembrandtsplein rembrandthuis rembrandts rembrandttheater rembrandtlaan rembrandttentoonstelling rembrandt's rembrand rembrandsplein rembrandtpleintheater rembrandtherdenking rembrandtsz rembrandtpark

- a prompt that narrows your search term to help you find exactly what it is you might be looking for amongst the 17 million possibilities. Further searches can be initiated according to content provider, (for example Culture.fr/collections) by country, by type, (audio, video or jpg), by language, date, or by rights (free access, public domain, paid access, cc by-NC-SA or CC by-NC-ND)11.

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11 See (CC) Creative Commons licenses

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Transmitting tangibility; the essence of the embodied gallery and the physical object

Search results can be displayed by table view, list view and on the impressive timeline view. The vast number of results, however, can be misleading. Rather than discovering thousands of paintings by Rembrandt we find photos of sketches attributed to Rembrandt’s students, mere references to the artist in a publication, and host of ephemera that is related in one way or another to the artist. Finding a specific artwork is not quite as simple as one would expect. For example, a search for ‘Night Watch’ does not bring back the sought after painting, and unless you have the patience to sift through all of the search results or you know how to spell the title of this famous painting in Dutch, ‘Nachtwacht,’ you wont find it. Once you get to the record page there are links to each line in the description that takes you to either Google or Bing for translation. A search for Nachtwatcht incidentally brings back two results, both of which lead to the same page on the Rijksmuseum home page.

In terms of sheer quantity, Europeana clearly delivers an impressive range of rich information right into the palm of your hand, but what about the less tangible quality of the art – that intangibly vague quality that can best be described as the wondrous quality of the object? Can either of these websites deliver anything to convey the auratic12 quality of the art?

Disseminating intangibility; the descriptive qualities of textural metadata We have noted that the museum visit is essentially an embodied experience, in that visitors actually come through the physical door, and wander around the galleries either by themselves or with others. Visitors know that by making the effort of actually leaving their homes and coming into a museum, like they do to a live sports event or a walk in the countryside, there awaits them an opportunity that is worth the effort. We feel a certain satisfaction when we come across objects and works of art that we are simply not going to find in our own homes, or for that matter, anywhere else outside the museum. This kind of experience can be described as a combination of enjoyment, entertainment and education, depending on the kind of exhibition and kind of object encountered in the gallery. Clearly the online museum can only reflect part of these qualities and it clearly doesn’t even try to replace the physical visit. So what actually is the in essence of the art when viewed online, and what is left of the collections if the 'wow factor' cannot be meaningfully conveyed? The Google Art Project does offer some measure of the ‘wow factor’. The images are gorgeous and it is fun to be able to ‘drive’ through the galleries and enjoy the art. The 'wow' factor with Europeana lies in the sheer quantity of rich content that lies at our fingertips, and even if you do need to click onto the next link to reach the full record and images, searching can be stimulating and rewarding. In both cases, the reward lies also in the textural records, and in the descriptions and narratives that are so intuitively accessible. Just knowing where to find the artwork or object and being able to find out about the treasures of so many Europeana countries is truly a daunting experience.

Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 scenarios Much has been written both in this publication and elsewhere about Web 2.0 and the prosumer; the producer/consumer who can now author, and direct his own micro-content in a Web 2.0 world. This section briefly describes the user generated possibilities and opportunities for active contribution in

12 This is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s discussion on the aura from his 1932 seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

6 the two platforms described above. Until recently museum web-based interaction was based on the Web 1.0 scenario which emerged from the traditional of the role as 'educator'; the role that museums have taken on for themselves since the emergence of the modern museum in the early 19th century. One of the measures of a successful Web 2.0 scenario is the measure of satisfaction for the ‘Y’ generation (Millennial Generation, or Millennials) when using these platforms, and the ways in which the content creates a buzz over social networks. Any museum that doesn’t have its own Facebook page, for example, is simply off the radar for this generation, and increasingly for all users on the WWW. It seems that now fraternal links to Twitter, YouTube, and the other myriad popular sites are de rigueur for any Web 1.0 site that wishes to hold its own. Features, widgets, and plug-ins are all measures of Web 2.0 integration, and both of these projects have their own versions that seamlessly move content from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 environments. Europeana has integrated these cross-links through to a number of the popular sites where you are invited to ‘search line value with’: Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Smithsonian, Google, Worldcat, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, and IMB. Another of the many interesting features in Europeana is the code that allows you to embed an image and its metadata where you can set up instant access in your own site, blog, or Facebook page, for example to the Nightwatch/Nachwatch page in Europeana13. In the same way as you can create your own shopping cart/light box in the Google Art Project, you can also set up your own collection in ‘My Europeana’. The only difference here is that your collections links you to a series of pages in Europeana rather than making a collection of individual images from the art in the Google Art Project. The features described above in Google Art Project, however, do little to encourage user participation other than inviting users to aggregate their own collections and share them with others, and this does open up a can of worms in respect to ownership. In the FAQ's Google asks 'are the images on the Art Project site copyright protected?' and answers … "The high resolution imagery of artworks featured on the art project site are owned by the museums, and these images may be subject to copyright laws around the world. The Street View imagery is owned by Google. All of the imagery on this site is provided for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the art project site, in the manner permitted by Google’s Terms of Service." This kind of puts a damper on the illusion of ownership, but still encourages us all to enjoy the fabulous works now available for us to peruse in very high resolution while perched on our Google driver’s shoulders. While Europeana is still developing its services, there obviously is the potential for true user generated participation. One excellent example is the invitation to join in the - World War One in pictures, letters and memories. Europeana first started to build this archive in the UK with the help of individuals who wished to contribute their material and memorabilia. Currently the invitation is also extended to people in Germany who are invited to contribute pictures, letters, postcards, souvenirs or other items from 1914-1918 relating to Germany or German people. Stories or anecdotes are welcome and encouraged, and the result is a fully integrated platform, a true Web 2.0 scenario potentially enacted all across Europe.

World War One in pictures, letters and memories, on Europeana

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7 Conclusion: the loss and the gain

So where has the wonder gone; and how can online environments possibly deliver the aura of the original object and replace the embodied physical experience of the encounter with the real object in the gallery? This is akin in some ways to the passionate discussions on the demise of the book. Clearly an artwork is not an e-book, and there is still a lot of debate around those who still treasure the traditional, linear rendering of ‘the printed page’ even to the point of fetishizing the book. Janet Murray reminds us

It is now clear that books will not disappear with the advent of digital genres – they will receive ever wider distribution and broader availability as they are instantiated in networked bits as well as in ink on paper. But bringing traditional books into digital form makes us aware of how much more we want from them than the paper-based versions can offer. We want them to be more portable, annotatable, searchable, and more linked to the world of all the media artifacts they reference: to films, databases, maps, and to the afterthoughts of their authors and the citations of others14.

This can only represent a celebration rather than the demise of the book, and clearly the 'book,' in one form or another, still plays a very central role in our lives. Working in a museum, I am always envious of librarians, who deal with ‘symbolic media’ as Murray argues; whose treasures can move almost seamlessly from scroll to codex to movable print to e-page as a simple matter of technology.

Museum curators also do battling with symbolic representations of the artwork or archaeological object as they are released into the ether, and wish that like book lovers, we could move our treasures from the tangible to the intangible in such an effortless way. However, we can’t, and we have to make due with symbolic representations of our art on a two-dimensional ‘page’ that often looks more like a postcard that has been wallpapered onto the screen. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that the alternatives to web pages - the printed book of an exhibition catalog, a television program, or even further removed from the wondrous impact of a unique artwork, a radio spot describing an exhibition – are similarly less than inspiring.

I prefer to be able to be able to access my art when and where I want, and I would argue that both of these platforms do an exceptional job in delivering them to me – even into the palm of my hand. With Europeana I can get a dizzying gestalt overview of the richness and breadth of Europe’s cultural heritage in one swoop, and with the Google Art Project I get transported from collection to collection to some of the worlds’ most fabulous treasures in an instant. There are maybe only 17 institutions and only 17 million objects out there for me to discover, but right now, when I go searching for my art online, I know exactly where I will click to find it.

14 The Book Tomorrow: Future of the Written Word by Janet H. Murray,

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