Perhaps the biggest challenge facing museums that seek to collaborate on the Web is not financial, technological, or legal. It is the remarkable force exerted by territoriality--the sense that linking information requires yielding authority. This is a natural response, even in fields of endeavor where direct competition is not at issue. The old axiom goes that the less significant the stakes in a struggle, the fiercer it is. That is certainly the case with academic departmental politics; museums rank only marginally above that in our attachment to every possible form of intellectual property. Apart from the billions of dollars of artworks in our care and the millions of visitors who make use of our millions of square feet, intellectual property is all we have. And the problem for art museums is that the promise of revenue from the sale of digital versions of that property is so alluring that collaborative ventures trigger a preternatural fear of loss of control.
In all seriousness, art museums do face an unusual challenge with regard to intellectual property. Whereas a history museum or zoo might be said to collect examples of multiples, like uniforms or ocelots, art museums usually collect unique works, like oil paintings and marble statues. The theory is that these are, unlike most uniforms, irreplaceable, and therefore that an equivalent status should be accorded images of such artworks, or else the value of the images will plummet. This assumption is somewhat complicated, and is inextricably linked with the market value of what is reproduced, unlike, say, an Ansel Adams landscape. In the end the true value of the _object_ lies in its irreplaceability, and it might be argued that the more it is reproduced, the more value it acquires. An example is Munch's _The Scream_, currently on view in our museum in Toronto. Were it not so widely reproduced in all kinds of ways, both respectful and irreverent, we would probably not have had to spend tens of thousands of dollars insuring a single picture, since its fair market value would be more in line with that of other late nineteenth-century symbolist oils.
It is the twin concern of museum leaders that someone else will profit if we "lose" control of images in our collections, and that the original artistic intention of the artist will be lost or corrupted. These are legitimate concerns, and ones which we will seek to address through a site licensing approach to the aggregate of images from North America's largest art museums.
Among the market assumptions we will test in establishing this site licensing consortium is that those works of art which are relatively obscure stand to acquire more value if they begin to be widely reproduced--even in irreverent ways, as the example of The Scream or that of the Mona Lisa demonstrate. If the situation were an either/or one, I vouchsafe that more directors would prefer a gain in the value of their art collection to retaining all of the (modest) income to be realized from the licensing of images of those lesser-known works. This is one of many assumptions we will test over the coming months.
But these musings are digressions from a central problem: How to create a network of networks, a place for the collaborative efforts of the nation's largest art museums as a prelude to other kinds of networks of like-minded museums. I say prelude because art museums have, in the Association of Art Museum Directors, a group of under 200 institutions that represent the majority of the content of their field. And as a professional association dating back to 1909, we are experienced in the ways of working together to define ethical, legal, financial, administrative, and other norms in our profession, which have to a greater or lesser degree been grafted onto other similar professional associations. But what brings us together on the Web is the remarkable opportunity to marshal our images in a way that can benefit research and instruction, and not incidentally promise to produce a regular stream of income from the provision of access to copyrighted images and information which we are in the business of maintaining.
But the purveying of digital images is a ways away, since we have substantial obstacles to overcome in defining the financial, legal, and technological instruments necessary to enable an image consortium. We are busily at work on these, and will have more to report at the next, and as David Bearman has suggested, possibly the last Museums & the Web conference. On the Art Museum Network's site (http://www.AMN.org), the Art Museum Image Consortium, or AMICO, will be the twelfth of 12 channels. In understanding the potential of networked information for museums at large, it is more fruitful and more widely applicable to review the other 11 channels of the Network as they are currently being refined.
Before we consider those channels, it is important to note that the immediate future of the Art Museum Network involves three simultaneous platforms of information dissemination and retrieval: archived information, interactivity, and real-time programming.
Museums are already familiar with archived information. From the grey backgrounds of 1993 Mosaic-based websites to today, this is the most familiar method of using the Web: publish online. Put brochures on the Net. This has been and will remain a critical part of communicating with the public, particularly as we become more sophisticated in providing information, using fields of data that allow the end user to tailor it to their interest, devising search tools that pull one to and fro within a single institution or among a handful or hundreds of museums, and adding services to that information, including digital transactions. One of the more interesting arenas for this output and retrieval approach will be the searchable exhibition calendars that we are developing, which will allow end users to find exhibits by theme, period, artist, venue, dates, and institution, and for that matter, to allow online purchases of tickets, exhibition catalogues and merchandise in association with this service. This kind of information provision and online service will connect visitors and potential visitors to a major activity of our museums; it is obvious that we will also offer exhibition previews online, which can result not only in the ultimate transaction of tickets or merchandise, but also in the experience of the entire exhibition itself for a modest fee, much in the way that we can order movies on demand.
The same approach to building a search engine with transactional options is being undertaken with our stores; we are simultaneously building an application to allow online browsers to navigate through an AMN store, wherein they may sample merchandise based on price point, type of article, theme, or institution, and then purchase them and arrange delivery of merchandise. The potential for this approach to accessing services at museums is quite significant, and the two largest arenas for now--exhibition-related services and museum shopping--are occupying much of our time and money in building the network, but the most interesting next steps are in facilitating the interactivity and real-time programming afforded by AMN's channels. A glimpse at our 11 channels may give a sense of what we are attempting:
For children the allure of a dedicated channel will have to be the potential for gamesmanship, interactivity with peers, infotainment, and other kinds of new communication tools born in the game arcade and now indivisible from mass media efforts across the film and television industry. Our challenge will be to connect these kinds of invitations to interact with an educational mission, and the hope is very real that through the efforts of our dozens of education departments, we can jointly construct ways of engaging young people that will pique their curiosity about a visit to a museum as well as a familiarity with who we are and what we do. Bruno Bettleheim showed in 1980 that children's visits to museums with their families were much more likely--60% more likely--to trigger repeat visitation while adults than are school visits--which accounted for only 3% of adult visitors' explanation for why they continue to visit museums. The real-time programming for kids that we hope to enable offers an interesting arena for international collaboration. A treasure hunt on the Net in search of information would allow for some fast-paced detective work by teams of children or children working on their own, and the opportunities for cross-pollination are considerable.
But the real power of this channel begins when curriculum-based learning reorients museum education from teaching them about art only from our perspective to serving the needs of schools more directly. When assignments _require_ children to link up to local or distant museum resources, we can begin to create an appetite for visitation that will go beyond amusement and novelty to true partnerships between schools and museums.
The captive audience of our own staffs will best be served with information, interactivity, and real-time broadcasting that serves the interest of our employees. Among other things, we can streamline communication links among professionals, post position openings, descriptions, and recently filled positions, promote the use of archived statistics and anecdotes of best practices, stage mimi-conventions with real-time broadcasts of lectures and tours, promote inter-departmental and inter-institutional partnerships, reinforce regional connections, and in general envigorate the sense of community among our staffs.
What would prompt journalists to stay in touch with AMN? For one thing, a regular menu of live press conferences across North America. For another, the frequent provision of news stories on recent acquisitions, new hires, exhibition plans, programming innovations, behind-the-scenes tours of building renovations or additions in progress, human interest stories, and numerous other invitations to lift the veil of art museums' activities, all with an eye to increasing coverage of who we are and what we do. Recent surveys show for one major metropolitan art museum that far beyond banners, tv and radio coverage, and even word of mouth, it is newspapers that continue to move people indoors to our art museums. That being the case for now, we should make it as easy as possible for journalists to find timely information about us. In addition, we should retrain our publicists to become broadcasters; if news-gathering organizations cannot be drawn to us instead of our having to send out hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive slide sets, photos, and news releases each year, then we are doing something wrong.
Distance-learning runs the risk of becoming a phrase like "right-sizing". It sounds plausible enough as a goal but involves hard choices. By building local access to information assembled by museums and connecting these efforts with the curricular needs of teachers, AMN stands to draw together pioneering efforts like those of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts with other initiatives to work out how electronic interactivity can play a role in childhood education. Teachers should find on this channel of AMN not only existing resources to bridge their lesson plans with our content, but also a burgeoning level of communication with museum educators, librarians, and other specialists on staff. Numerous distance-learning experiments, including an eight-figure project being undertaken by a not-for-profit in Ontario in association with our museum, promise to bear fruit before long. The results of these experiments should be shared with all.
Students in high school and college who need access to resources to complete their studies will soon enough demand more of museums. From developing archived information to building programs and interactivity, the possibilities for reliance on museums as information brokers become quite exciting. Courses developed jointly by schools and museums could include art historically-based social science offerings, chemistry and conservation seminars, bioscientific studies of the microclimates of museums as containers for people and art, engineering reviews of museum's physical plants, business schools' analyses of not-for-profit practices at museums, and law students' consideration of the legal issues surfaced by the international art trade and intellectual property law, are just a handful of the options at our disposal. Museums on the network can assemble and allow searching through fellowships and internships across the continent, mentoring programs, live interviews with artists, guided tours through vaults, and a host of other programming innovations.
The rationale for a sponsors' channel sounds at first sycophantic, by creating real estate to showcase donors. But once we network grant application information, tailored to categories of institutions, exhibitions, publications, and programs, highlight the eligibility of individuals and institutions in the visual arts for support from all sectors of government, highlight statistical evidence of the rewards of sponsorship, and help support the network through paid links to promotional information, the rewards may be more obvious.
A major area for growth in earned income for museums is in special events. Museums stand to become more sophisticated in marketing their public spaces by highlighting images and specifications of areas in their buildings available for events through still images and video-streamed orientations with voice-over Q&A narrations. These will not be limited to private and corporate celebrations--ideally the mix includes meetings of professional associations of likely interest to development departments, as well as award ceremonies, government-organized gatherings, convention-related receptions, and other functions that may relate to the museum's overall needs for income generation. By connecting potential clients with images and tours of our spaces, menus, and e-mail addresses of relevant staff, we may contribute to the greater reach of our museums into their communities as gathering places.
Similarly, although the largest industry in the world is tourism, and museums are central to it, we have been on the whole uncoordinated in wielding our power as a driving force for local economic development. By making it simple for those planning tours of particular cities or areas to find us, see what kinds of guided or self-guided collection visits we can offer, and the range of amenities available at our museums, we should be able to improve the visibility of museums in the map of tourism. By allowing tour planners to purchase tickets, pre-order exhibition catalogues, reserve restaurant seating, and coordinate with hotels and other local attractions, we will be more competitive as magnets for visitation.
The universe of scholars around the globe who call upon images of objects in museums for research or instruction rarely turn to the museums themselves for anything beyond a visit other than seeking transparencies or permission to reproduce them. We need to become better resources for scholars, by providing the networked information on our collections that the Art Museum Image Consortium portends, enabling them to search our networked bookstores for remaindered monographs and catalogues, and allowing them to conduct research in tandem with our librarians, registrars, curators, and educators. We stand to become more integral to advanced research as networking changes the potential for interaction with the stewards of the objects that are the focus of interest. The frontiers for scholars are exciting in part because we are such a neglected resource for the very people who rely on us to safeguard the subject of their life's work, but often know little about what that entails.
Tens of thousands of North Americans spend hundreds of thousands of hours supporting our mission each year. The very least we can do is provide them with an electronic village green to share their innovations, plan meetings, solicit participation, recruit and train conscripts, post volunteer position descriptions, and encourage greater collaboration with staff.
These 12 channels are designed as a six-month experiment on the network; they may metamorphose into another approach to interactivity as cable modems and WebTVs change the landscape through the integration of the personal computer and the television. The next phase will require a more active programming element, and much more interactivity. For that to succeed, we will call upon the directors of the 180 museums in AAMD to direct their respective staff members to provide information according to agreed-upon protocols that will enable true inter-institutional navigation. /
All of these efforts will be reshaped eventually through the acceptance of digital cash. Online transactions will determine who's running the world; banks are now printing currency, in the form of debit cards. The US and Royal Mints have yet to catch up with technology; even the AGO has just introduced a debit card, which will begin to test assumptions about the ownership of currency; we are effectively selling financial instruments and borrowing money from the public for short-term investment. How this will play out on the Web will affect all of us, not just museums. But it is worth following one possible relevant thread. Once our stores are networked, it will be relatively straightforward to sell merchandise both from each museum attached to the network and to imagine selling certain items on behalf of all of the museums in the consortium. These could include product lines which most of us turn to outside of our own museum-branded merchandise. Dividing the profits among all participating museums would be a relatively simple transaction, and we would in effect be enabling a distribution outlet that would require deals not with museum business managers but with product manufacturers. Similarly, we are looking to arrange courier services on behalf of AMN to pick up museum store merchandise. With some items, it may prove more sensible to warehouse items to be sold over AMN and have the courier service pick up from a common warehouse, the only binding element of which is the sales potential of a networked museum store.
The future of networked art museums is certain to involve the repositioning of museums as centers of research, experience, publication, and commerce. With regard to research, the benefits are obvious, and go far beyond access to databases and shared postings, online inquiries, imaging techniques for identification, morphing to speculate on missing elements of works of art, and aiding in the recovery of stolen works. Expertise will have a new character: intuition and relational thinking will play at least as large a role as experience. The academic world will face the inevitability that human memory will indeed be less highly prized than before. The nature of a museum visit will be palpably different, since the visitor will have at his or her command a massive database delivered at appropriate levels from schoolchildren to scholars. The experience of the original object stands to be richer, relatable to other experiences, and more easily recalled.
In the realms of publication and communication, museums must work to become centers more broadly based and community-oriented than universities, and more focused in content. As we move towards the site licensing of images of artworks on the Web, the next issue confronting us is how willing we will be as a profession to share "unpublished" information. Publication has already been transformed by electronic communication. The stirring of a bear market in intellectual property may threaten the most natural course of events, which would favor the provision of data and images at the earliest possible convenience, and accelerate the mid-course corrections of flawed assumptions, rendering vengeful book reviews a less frequently wielded weapon. That will represent a privation of sorts, since in the academy as elsewhere, the vindication of one's own divergent point of view is best expressed in the ostensibly objective forum of the review--although it is as often a vehicle for self-rehabilitation as for the revelation of factual error./
It is all too easy to take such a position from the administrative recesses of a museum, and far harder to do so as a scholar implicated in the academy's reward system. But ultimately a technological imperative will likely lead us to adapt to new communicative norms, and thus this would constitute a truce in advance of our probable accommodation to one of the coming conflicts between the stewards of intellectual property qua property and the staggering permeability and informational elephantiasis of the Internet./
The first phase of networking information among museums is thus underway: the Art Museum Network is an emerging resource that hopes to link the scholarship, educational resources, interactive potential, and financial ambitions of museums throughout North America. It operates from the premise that networked information is the greatest untapped potential of the Internet. By implementing a site licensing approach to images and text the museum profession could be in a position to undertake true collaboration of the sort that the _disiecta membra_ of our collections demand. The hardest part of the next phase of collaboration among museums is how to enable the cash return for licensing access to images and text purveyed by those institutions, which will move museums from being fledgling players in the world of intellectual currency to more significant ones. Museums are, after all, the place where the work of the solitary scholar or the networked community of scholars in our field have the greatest opportunity to reap rewards from the commodification of their research beyond tenure decisions and into reputation among those in fields beyond their own, let alone the public at large.
The state invented the Internet but created in so doing tools to undermine its authority. The digital economy is out pacing state economies, as Wall Street brokers bankers and investors trading online determine interest rates throughout North America, and governments follow the implications within the limited range of political maneuverability permitted by the global economy. Banks are now replacing state currencies with debit cards, and private enterprise will soon enough challenge the banks. Non-financial Information traveling over networks is similarly replacing the official word--from Tienanmen Square to the Internet-based lawsuit against McDonalds in the UK.
Not only is the public sector no longer controlling information, but soon it will be up to town criers on the Internet like the Art Museum Network to capture our attention. And this migration is on the whole a healthy antidote to the alternative, which is to have us all drown in the rising tide of commercialism, advertising, marketing, and spin control which is the manifest destiny of mass communication. Although commercial information services hope that they will control the content, I believe that history will prove otherwise. Like the US government's invention of the Internet over thirty years ago to distribute confidential information, software manufacturers' belated recognition of the Internet as the mechanism to control non-confidential information will only provoke other efforts like ours attuned to the particular interests of millions of consumers, leading to competition in the provision of information on a scale which is today unimaginable. The implications for the worlds of education, commerce, publication, and broadcasting, are too staggering for us to fathom today.
Copyright Archives & Museum Informatics, 1997
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Last modified: February 28, 1997
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