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 2 <http://group.europeana.eu/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=6773c7f5-613c-4d9f-ab6d-95ed10c323bc&groupId=10128> 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, <http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/angelaki/angelaki.html> 4 <http://www.europeana.eu/portal/aboutus_background.html> 5 <http://www.google.com/jobs/lifeatgoogle/englife/index.html> 6 <http://www.googleartproject.com/c/faq> 3 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.