The Transformation of the Museum and the Way it's Perceived

Howard Besser
School of Information & Systems
University of California at Berkeley
howard@sims.berkeley.edu
[to appear in Katherine Jones-Garmil (ed.), The Wired Museum, Washington:
American Association of Museums, 1997]

New technologies are beginning to cause significant changes in the way

museums perform their functions and in the way they are perceived by the
public. The rapid conversion of text and images into digital form will affect work
processes within the museum. Coupled with the advent of high speed digital
networks, this convergence will permit the museum to provide more information
to a wider general public.
In this chapter we will explore how technology is likely to transform museums in
the coming years. We will look at multimedia exhibits delivered over the Internet
as well as other effects of widespread adoption of digital images, multimedia, and
high speed networks. We will examine how the adoption of these technologies is
likely to cause a convergence between computing systems used for exhibition
and those used for collection management, as well as cause paradigm shifts in
what constitutes a collection, how the public views museums, and how scholars
do research. And we will ground this study in an exploration of the library, a
cultural institution which is approximately a decade ahead of museums in the
transformation process.
A Changing World of Networked Digital Information
New channels for distribution of information are rapidly transforming the social
and cultural landscape. First the television and later the VCR have changed how
people consume culture. This has led to a transformation of cinemas and a
gravitation towards consumption of culture within personal environments
where the user has more control over the time and pacing of their interaction
with the culture. The widespread dissemination of networked digital information
from the cultural arena is likely to have a similar effect on other forms of culture,
moving them into personal spaces where the user asserts more control over
pacing and over when the interaction takes place.
We are already seeing a transformation in the world of librarianship. Libraries
are becoming less important for the materials they collect or house, and more
important for what kind of material they can obtain in response to user requests.
This movement from collecting material "just in case" someone will need it, to
one of developing relationships allowing the library to deliver material from
elsewhere "just in time" to answer a user's needs is a profound shift for the
library as an institution. This shift to on-demand delivery of material from
elsewhere is a direct result of the recent proliferation of digital networking in an
environment where standards for description were already well established.
Along with the changes to libraries as institutions have come changes to the roles
of librarians. The proliferation of networked digital information is causing a shift
of librarians from caretakers of physical collections to people who identify
resources that exist in collections housed elsewhere. This is currently evident in
most major research libraries where librarians spend much of their time creating
(WorldWide Web based) electronic pointers to resources on the Internet. Efforts
like this are likely to greatly increase in the foreseeable future.
As museums embrace networking and convert their information into digital
form, we can expect to see similar sweeping changes both in the roles of museum
employees, and in how the public views cultural repositories.
Automation-enabled Trends
Recent technological developments have created new capabilities for
information repositories. These capabilities in turn will serve as agents that will
enable major transformations within these repositories. In this section we will
examine a number of the trends that emanate from new technologies, and (after
reviewing how these are affecting libraries) speculate as to how these are likely
to transform museums.
Large files, More detailed representations
Since the mid-1980s file storage capacity has increased and storage cost has
decreased at a phenomenal rate. The 20 megabyte hard drive that was
considered "large" in the mid-1980s cannot even be purchased in the mid-1990s
(when 500 megabyte disks are considered small). This increase in storage
capabilities has enabled the widespread digitization of large bodies of textual
information, and will soon enable the digitization of images and multimedia on a
massive scale.
Information repositories are in the business of creating representations of
original objects, often in the form of cataloging or collection management
records. This trend towards massive digitization has meant that repositories can
create more and more detailed representations (or "better abstracts") of
originals.
Library indexing and abstracting services began by providing titles and index
terms online. As storage costs diminished, they added searchable abstracts. Most
recently many added full text of articles. Similarly, library catalogs began with
bibliographic descriptions and subject headings, then some added Table of
Contents information, and today some of them are adding full text or page
images.
Since the early days of museum automation efforts, text-based collection
management records have served as abstracts (or stand-ins) for the objects they
represent. As storage costs have come down, museums have begun to add digital
images to their collection management records. In their initial forays into this
area, most museums planned to only use the image for identification purposes.
But museums who have begun on this path are increasingly realizing the utility
of using larger images for a variety of purposes.
Because file-size constraints will continue to rapidly diminish, these will no
longer serve as impediments to a repository's use of digital images. In the near
future we are likely to see significant increases in the use of digital images and
multimedia by cultural repositories.
Networking services, Access from multiple locations
Until the 1970s, computing was viewed as a service which was offered from a
particular physical location; user transactions had to be carried on punchcards to
the computer. The development of telecommunications capabilities and multi-
user systems allowed interactions to take place from remote locations, opening
up a host of new applications.
Networking developments have changed the landscape of computing. The 1960s
and 1970s notion of users operating dumb terminals and all computer services
residing on a central computer has been replaced by the concept of distributed
computing and individual user workstations. The ability to have processes on a
user's workstation interact with services from a centralized fileserver has led to
the phenomenal growth in WorldWide Web activities, services, and use. Web
browsers run decompression and formatting programs on files from remote
servers, and the text layout and display of images would be slow or impossible
without software running on the individual client.
For libraries this trend has meant that users no longer have to go to a single
centralized card catalog in order to view the library's holdings; all holdings are
usually available in each branch library or even from home workstations.
Indexing and abstracting services which were distributed in print form (and
usually housed in only one location) are now mounted on fileservers and
available from remote workstations.
As network speeds continue to increase, more and more individuals will access
information and entertainment from their workstations at home or work. Still
images, moving images, and multimedia will become available as networked
services. And as individuals access more and more of these resources online,
cultural repositories we be under increasing pressure to distribute in this arena.
It is very possible that many individuals will become less interested in traveling
to sites where they must wrestle with parking and limited hours, and that they
will only visit cultural repositories if they can do so any time of the day or night
from the comfort of their home workstation.
Better user interfaces, Diminishing role for intermediaries
The advent of graphic user interfaces has made it possible to operate many
computer applications with little or no training. In libraries, this has meant that
many users will explore bodies of information directly themselves, without
asking librarians to help point them in the right direction. And this has meant
that many libraries have reallocated staff positions, putting fewer resources into
directly answering patron queries and more resources into development and
maintenance of online services.
Libraries have begun to explore the storing of user profiles and preferences
(such as "only show me material in English" or "Display the items retrieved in
chronological order, most recent first"). And research laboratories are exploring
the development of "intelligent agents" which know about the user's preferences
(including content and level of detail desired, amount willing to pay, and time
willing to wait), and troll the Internet to bring back only the material that meets
the user's criteria. Developers of these agents expect them to replace many of the
jobs which today are devoted to helping people locate information.
The intuitive user interfaces of WorldWide Web browsers has shown that when
interfaces are easy to use and the cost of information is not expensive, users will
explore all kinds of new information resources. Cultural repositories should
learn that this can mean a great increase in the number of people exploring the
information that they generate.
Standards and protocols, More resources available
The development and adoption of standards and protocols has led to an
exponential growth in resources available on the Internet. Information cannot be
passed from one system to another without some kind of agreement on data
formatting and delivery. Z39.50 standards have allowed people to use their own
familiar query syntax to access library and other information resources around
the world. Standards for URLs (Universal Resource Locators) and HTML (Hyper-
Text Markup Language) have allowed WorldWide Web browsers to proliferate.
MIME and other standards for multimedia formats and compression have led to
wide availability of images and sound on the Internet. New industry standards
(such as VRML, Java, and Shockwave) promise to extend functionality to the
desktop, allowing users to interactively explore three-dimensional environments
(eventually including interactive exhibits) and quickly and conveniently display
complex multimedia information on their desktop.
The proliferation of resources available on the Internet has provided museum
personnel with access to a wide variety of information. In addition, more and
more museums are using the Internet to provide informational resources to
other museums and to the general public.
In addition to the enormous amount of information available on the Internet,
standards development has led to increased cooperation between institutions.
This is most evident in libraries where standards have led to cooperative efforts
in interlibrary loan and collection development. Much of the current museum
standards development and implementation is centered in the CIMI Project
(Computerized Interchange of Museum Information), and particularly in Project
CHIO (Cultural Heritage Information Online). The successful widespread
adoption of results from these projects are likely to lead to more cooperative
relationships between museums.
Collection Management & Exhibition: Increasing Crossover?
Historically, most museum automation efforts have been driven by the need for
record-keeping and inventory control, and have resulted in collection
management systems. A smaller collection of automation efforts has centered in
museum education departments, and has focused on interactive exhibits. The
vendors, software, tools, and platforms for computers used in collection
management have been very different from those in interactive exhibitions. (For
a summary of the differing characteristics between the two, see figure #1.) This
split was due to technological limitations, but recent technological changes are
likely to increasingly cause a convergence between these two camps.
Collection management systems have historically handled very complex
information but have had poor user interfaces and been extremely difficult to
learn to use. User interfaces for these systems were very slow to even
incorporate underlining or font changes, and not until the mid-1990s did these
systems begin to utilize a graphic user interface or a mouse.
Multimedia exhibitions, on the other hand, have used graphic, point-and-click
interfaces since the mid-1980s. Because there is no chance to give even a short
"how-to-use" lesson to a museum visitor, these user interfaces had to be intuitive
and easy to use.
Collection management systems are object-based, and most data within them
refers to a particular object. Though they can reflect complex relationships
between objects, this is usually limited to situating an object within a set (a
group or a collection). The relationship between an object and other objects,
people, or theories, (usually a key element of an exhibition catalog) is seldom
reflected in a collection management system.
Multimedia exhibition packages, on the other hand, primarily offer a narrative
structure; they essentially tell a story and situate the objects in some relationship
with other objects, people, and theories. They also offer a coherent view of some
domain, unlike collection management systems which focus on individual
objects. In this sense they are much closer to an exhibit or exhibition catalog than
to a collection management system.
Interactive Multimedia Exhibition Collection Management Systems
Packages Designed for explanation and access
Designed for inventory control, record-keeping
Good user interface Poor user interface Records are limited
and carefully Unlimited records and all are selected
available static dynamic
figure #1
Collection management systems attempt to create and store records for every
object in the museum. Interactive exhibits, on the other hand, usually store only a
selected group of records and images -- just enough to tell a story. And while the
records in the exhibition system may be derived from records in the collection
management system, they are often enhanced and always stored in a separate
location.
Collection management systems usually incorporate a powerful database, and
give users the opportunity to pose just about any possible query to that database.
Interactive exhibit systems seldom contain a database. Though on the surface
these exhibit systems appear to give users a variety of choices, usually the choice
consists of multiple-choice branching, with only branches anticipated by system
designers being possible.
Collection management systems have tended to be relatively open; for the most
part vendors have recognized the need to import records into these systems and
export them to other systems, and in recent years have provided tools so that
even naive users can perform these functions. Interactive exhibit systems, on the
other hand, have almost always been "closed-box" systems. They see themselves
as stand-alone systems that have no need to share information with other
applications (except perhaps during the early stage of a project when developers
might take text or images from other sources).
While collection management systems have always been dynamic (with system
tools oriented towards handling data that is constantly growing and being
updated), interactive exhibits have tended to have static contents. Like a
publishing media, interactive exhibits have mostly captured growing and
changing information and frozen it at a particular point in time, and systems
have seldom provided tools for updating that information.
A number of technological limitations have led interactive exhibit systems to
evolve in this particular way. Until recently, the vast storage needs for digital
multimedia had led most developers to favor analog videodisc systems. Because
in the mid-to-late 1980s good toolkits for developing graphic user interfaces
were only available on single-user systems (like the Macintosh at that point in
time), most interactive exhibit developers conceptualized their projects as
single-user systems. Developers chose to store their text and images in whatever
format would help them achieve the highest performance, ignoring standard
formats (which frequently diminished multimedia performance). They also
discovered that they could simplify their work if they chose to limit the total
amount of information, and control the types of questions that could be asked.
And because most developers saw their work as ending with the installation of
the interactive exhibit, few considered implementation of a function to export
images or text.
Collection management systems were first implemented on mainframe
computers, then on early PCs -- both platforms that were slow to adopt graphic
user interfaces or incorporate images or multimedia. System vendors have seen
their role as handling complex information about and relationships between
objects (in groups), and until recently ignored technological developments
bringing graphic interfaces and multimedia to their platforms.
Technological developments are making collection management systems and
interactive exhibits begin to share more characteristics in common. The advent
of faster processors, higher capacity digital storage, and more efficient
compression algorithms will soon eliminate some of the major performance
concerns that have led the interactive developers to avoid standards and keep
their text and images in formats that are inaccessible from other applications.
This coupled with the development of platform-independent multimedia
authoring systems will likely lead developers away from single-station, closed-
box systems.
The advent of robust graphic user interface toolkits and software for handling
multimedia are making it easy for collection management systems to develop
better user interfaces and incorporate forms of multimedia. As they do this, on
some levels they will begin to resemble the interactive multimedia systems.
But the recent development which holds the greatest promise for the
convergence between interactive exhibition systems and collection management
systems is the WorldWide Web (WWW). The widespread deployment of WWW
browsing tools essentially creates tens of thousands of multimedia-capable
"clients". This large "market" will provide incentive for interactive developers to
abandon closed-box, single-station systems in favor of producing "servers"
designed to deliver to multiple clients -- something that just wasn't possible
before the number of clients had reached a critical mass.
The WWW holds the promise of combining an overall narrative view of some
domain with a database of individual items. A museum could create WWW
documents out of narrative essays from an exhibition catalog and link these
directly to text and images from a collection management system which is
constantly being updated. Thus, instead of the "frozen snapshot" that
characterizes most catalogs and interactive exhibits, the WWW exhibit would be
dynamically updated as collection management records changed. Furthermore,
designers of a WWW interactive exhibit could allow users to view any non-
protected text or image within the collection management system and to ask
almost unlimited questions -- a radical departure from the limited questioning
available within current interactive exhibits.
Though thus far this has not been fully exploited, this approach holds great
promise in integrating the advantages of both interactive multimedia exhibition
tools and collection management systems, while eliminating many of the
drawbacks of each of these.
Broader Trends
Information technology will cause broad changes in museums and in how the
general public perceives cultural objects. There is no way of accurately
predicting what these changes will be, but we can certainly identify major areas
of concern and ask questions about what kind of changes will occur in these
areas. In another chapter in this volume ("The changing Role of Photographic
Collections With the Advent of Digitization") this author speculates about how
the democratization of access will affect how people view cultural objects, and he
examines issues of authorship, ownership, and intellectual property. In this
section we will raise questions about basic changes to research and scholarship,
as well as impending changes to museums and how they're perceived.
Changes to Scholarship
In the past, scholarly examination of books, photographs, and other material
took place only in specialized environments such as museums, archives, and
libraries. As tools are developed to analyze works from personal computers, and
as more of the works are available digitally through networks and CDs, scholarly
research will shift from these specialized environments to homes and offices.
This is likely to change both the way scholars work and the view of research
institutions as specialized environments.
A scholar's workstation can provide tools which allow the user to analyze digital
images, combine them in different ways, create new juxtapositions, and explore
scholarly text-based information about individual images, artists, subjects
portrayed, etc. (Besser 1987; Besser 1991; ; Besser 1992) For example, the
viewer can examine images of a work of art both before and after restoration,
and make up their own mind as to the appropriateness of the restoration. Or
they can compare three translations of an ancient manuscript and look at them
all on the screen side-by-side. When the scholars workstation is combined with
access to databanks of journals, other textual information, and digital images,
this will provide the scholar with powerful tools to do his/her research.
Though we can identify a variety of tools that might be desirable in such a
workstation (bibliography-handling, finding tools, image-sorting, image-
processing, multivalent documents, etc.), much work still needs to be done to
identify and develop tools to aid the researcher. Even in the field of imaging
there has only been one significant set of studies to date of image quality needs
of scholarly researchers (Ester 1990, Ester 1994).
But the world of information at the scholar's fingertips carries with it the
potential for recasting scholarship. If user behavior on the WWW is any example,
when a huge body of multimedia information is readily available it is possible
that scholarship may shift its focus from discovering new knowledge within
objects to discovering connections and themes between them.
Changes to the museums and how they're perceived
As more and more museum information (images and text about the objects,
online exhibits) becomes available across the Internet, will people begin to
forego the experience of actually visiting a museum? When a large number of
museum visitors find it possible to visit and exhibit without physically entering
the museum premises, how does that change the public's perception of the
museum? Does the museum's authority increase (because more people actually
see its exhibits)? Or does it decrease (because its being delivered through a
channel adjacent to "Home Shopping")?
When a museum begins to service more people online than in person, will more
resources be put into online exhibits than into physical exhibits? How will
services to the public change? Will sources that currently base funding levels
upon the number of people who enter the museum premises change their
accountability measures to include online visits? If so, will the ability to track
how often viewers look at each individual part of an online exhibit affect the
types of items and themes covered (causing a focus on high-visitation areas)?
At this point in time, the building blocks for most WorldWide Web exhibitions
are relatively small files of descriptive text and images which are joined together
through links to them from a set of master files which provide the narrative
coherence to the exhibit. As museums create more and more of these building
blocks of images and descriptive text online, will disputes develop over the rights
to use these building blocks in different ways? Will commercial enterprises
develop their own exhibits that incorporate links to hundreds (or thousands) of
these building blocks in museums? Will the fact that anyone can link to these
building blocks begin to erode the authority of the curator (as the only who can
visually present themes and juxtapositions)?
As the general populace begins to visit more online exhibits, will a museum
become more notable for the strength of their online presentation than for the
contents of their collection?
Acknowledgments
Some of the ideas here are excerpted from The Changing Museum, a paper the
author wrote for the 1987 Proceedings of the American Society for
Information Science (Besser 1987), and from The Changing Role of Photographic
Collections With the Advent of Digitization, a discussion paper he wrote for
the Working Group for Digital Image in Curatorial Practice (Besser 1994)
which met at George Eastman House on June 4, 1994 (organized by Roger
Bruce).
References
Howard Besser, "The Changing Museum," Proceedings of the 1987 Annual
Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Medford, NJ: Learned
Information, 1987, pages 14-19.
Howard Besser, "Advanced Applications of Imaging: Fine Arts," Journal of the
American Society of Information Science, September 1991, pages 589-596
Howard Besser, "Adding an Image Database to an Existing Library and Computer
Environment: Design and Technical Considerations," in Susan Stone and Michael
Buckland (eds.), Studies in Multimedia (Proceedings of the 1991 Mid-Year
Meeting of the American Society for Information Science), Medford, NJ: Learned
Information, 1992, pages 31-45.
Howard Besser, "The Changing Role of Photographic Collections With the Advent
of Digitization," in Roger Bruce (ed.), Selected Papers from the Working Group
for Digital Image in Curatorial Practice, George Eastman House, June 4, 1994
(gopher://gopher.tmn.com:70/11/Artswire/GEHIMP).
Howard Besser, "The changing Role of Photographic Collections With the Advent
of Digitization", 1996 (chapter in this volume)
Michael Ester, "Image Quality and Viewer Perception," Leonardo (Digital Image-
Digital Cinema, Supplemental Issue, 1990): 51-53.
Michael Ester, "Digital Images in the Context of Visual Collections and
Scholarship," Visual Resources X (1994):11-24.