When all You've Got is “The Real Thing”: Museums and Authenticity in the Networked World

Archives and Museum Informatics12: 107–125, 1998.© 1999Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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When all You’ve Got is “The Real Thing”:Museums and Authenticity in the NetworkedWorld ?

J. TRANTArchives & Museum Informatics, 5501 Walnut St., #203, Pittsburgh, PA, 15232, USA

Abstract. As networked informatio proliferates, museums are finding that their role as the soleinterpreter of their collections is being challenged. Rather than responding defesively, museumsneed to work together to improve access to their collections, and to differentiate their sites fromthe private museums created by enthusiasts. Cross-linking at all levels will enable the creation ofa trusted cultural heritage web, that enables users to follow themes and associations, free of theboundaries of historical collecting patterns. In this way, museums can offer a unique interpretationof authentic material culture to a generation comfortable in an immaterial world.

Key words: access, authenticity, linking, museums, world wide web

Introduction

It resonates with a generation, that famous advertising campaign for Coca Colaending with the tag line, that provides the title for this paper: “It’s the Real Thing”.This is a phrase that has come to be a part of contemporary culture, giving titlesto Dorris Lessing and Tom Stoppard1 among others. Its assertion of reality overappearance has given me pause as I looked at the question of museums and authen-ticity. Coke’s “Real Thing” campaign sits in opposition to the challenge of “ThePepsi Generation” – an exercise in positioning a new product as an alternative toan established and institutionalized nineteenth century beverage. It seems that thecultural heritage communities’ current concerns with “authenticity” and “quality”arise from a similar challenge: museums are deluged with an onslaught of inter-pretations of culture from an incredible number of sources, and forced into anawareness that they are no longer the sole interpreters of their collections. At thesame time as cultural heritage institutions are being challenged to incorporate other

? Author’s Note: The ideas in this paper were first developed for presentation at the AnnualMeeting of the Documentation Committee of ICOM (CIDOC), Nuremberg, September 1997. Theillustrations and URLs of the web sites discussed were current at that time.

1 Tom Stoppard,The Real Thing, 1984 and Dorris Lessing,The Real Thing, Stories and Sketches,HarperCollins, 1992.

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voices and other experiences into their interpretations of history and culture, andhave begun to rethink traditional interpretive strategies to be more inclusive.

This crisis is coming to a head in a new digital landscape, where the traditionalroles of author, editor, publisher, distributor and consumer of information havedramatically altered. When authors are creators and anyone can be a publisher,what is the place and role of cultural heritage institutions? Where and how canthey find their niche, as relevant players in the digital world?

Architecture and Authenticity

In networked space, users are without the traditional visual and spatial vocabularyof communication. Museums find themselves unable to rely upon the semioticsof a century of museological symbols that have enabled them, in public build-ings and spaces, to create the aura of authenticity and rarification cultivated tocommunicate the uniqueness of each of artifacts, and the seriousness of the educa-tional experience. Rightly, museums have been criticized for this approach, andthe redesign of museum spaces has become more open and welcoming.2 But, nodoubt partly because this tradition as exhibiting institutions has shaped museums’sense of the intellectual categorization of the objects that they for and inter-pret, many institutions have modeled their networked spaces on their physicalspaces.

One example of this spatially dictated organization of information can befound in the web site of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA), in New York<www.metmuseum.org>. Here, the “map” of the collections (See Figure 1) isdrawn from the map of the museum that a visitor picks up from the informationdesk, after she’s climbed the long stone staircase and walked between the flutedcolumns. While the opening page of the web site tries to communicate this expe-rience, the picture of the happy, assembled throngs on the steps of the MMA thatis found on their web site doesn’t create the sense of anticipation and the feeling“something important” is about to happen, that comes from climbing those stairs,and the stairs inside that lead to the second floor painting galleries.

As compelling as it may be to rely on the physical nature of the museum toconvey its weight and presence, such metaphors are often less than successful atcommunicating either content or context in the 640× 480 pixel world.3 The spatial

2 See Eilean Hooper-Greenhill,Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London and New York:Routledge, 1992, p. 202 for a discussion of the transformation of museum lobbies from resemblingprisons to resembling hotel lobbies, in a chapter entitled “A useful past for the present”.

3 I’m grateful to one of the reviewer of this article for pointing out that architectural and spatialmetaphors are often used with great success in computer games. One good example from the culturalheritage field isVersailles 1685: a game of intrigue at the Court of Louis XIVfrom the Reuniondes Muses Nationaux. However, I contend that the metaphor of a built environment fails as acommunication device if the digital experience simply models the physical one. There are too manyphysical constraints of ‘reality’ that do not correspond to the cognitive connections that we wishto communicate for a rendered 3D space be satisfactory by itself. We find ourselves wanting more,

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Figure 1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Second Floor Map <www.metmuseum.org/htmlfile/gallery/second/2ndfl.html> [Sept. 1997]. © Copyright The Metropolitan Museum ofArt.

organization of the galleries may or often may not reflect a logical sequence orprogression, and can be confusing and haphazard when seen without the physicalcontext of the building. Why, for example, does this map say that Nineteenth

wishing to move from physical to categorical space, for example, by following the relationshipsbetween a painting on a wall that arenot those of proximity in the exhibition gallery.

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Century European Paintings arebetweenIslamic Art, and 20th century art, butthat there islittle connectionbetween European painting and Nineteenth Centurypainting? Maps of physical spaces don’t always transpose into maps of informationspaces.

Museums often gave into the temptation, in an information space without maps,to transpose the physical world onto this new medium. But the intellectual infer-ences made based on graphic proximity in schematic diagrams are not those ofthe relative physical positioning of navigational maps.4 Transposing physical navi-gation into conceptual space, risks introducing errors in interpretation, as well asfailure to communicate clearly. Despite this danger, museums’ collective sense ofthe importance of their physical nature has given rise to many architecturally drivenweb site structures. Institutions are hanging onto their pediments and porticoes astalismans of the aura of authenticity that they symbolize.

Museums Without Walls, or Buildings Either . . .

Unfortunately, it is the dematerialization of networked information space thathas given rise to some of the greatest concerns in the museum world. NicolasPioch created Le Web Louvre, since metamorphosed into le web museum.<sunsite.unc.edu/wm/and mirrors>, without the involvement of Le Louvre. le webmuseum is perhaps the most well known and widely consulted of a plethora of‘personal museums’. These range from the “Art Galaxy” (Figure 2) maintained byMassoud Malek, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at CaliforniaState University, Hayward <www.mcs.csuhayward.eud/∼malek/Artfolder> to theprofessionally presented texas.net Museum of Art (Figure 3) maintained by MarkHarden at <www.webgalleries.com/>.

On the one hand, this personal interest and enthusiasm could be seen as apositive force, to be directed and channeled by museums in their on-line program-ming. But the disregard for copyright and intellectual property law – despite theoccasional presence of disclaimers that the sites are being created for personaland educational use – and the appropriation of published materials withoutacknowledgment, is worrisome; the appropriation of symbols may pose more ofa challenge, as they could be considered misleading.

Perhaps more significantly, these sites exist in without reference to the realitythat they represent. Reproductions of works of art are most often online without anyindication of their original size, position, or placement. The hangings of virtualgalleries are often impossible: theMona Lisa, a Canaletto, and a Mary Cassattdrypoint are all almost the same size in the Art Galaxy (Figure 4).

4 Much new work now going on regarding the interpretation of complex information spaces. Forexample, Dynamic Diagrams has mapped the Mystic Seaport site, using its Mapa software. Seewww.mystic.org and www.dynamicdiagrams.com.


Figure 2. The Art Galaxy maintained by Massoud Malek, Professor of Mathematicsand Computer Science at California State University, Hayward, California, <www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/∼malek/Amore.html> [Sept. . . . 1997].

Often manipulated or altered images are included without reference to theoriginal. In the Art Galaxy’s Gallery of Illusions, <www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/∼malek/Illusions/Tempsrb.html> a series of well known paintings are manipulatedso that the red and blue color spaces are offset slightly (Figure 5).

While it is possible to find a more faithful reproduction of Mary Cassatt’sBoating Party elsewhere on this site (and many other places on the Internet,including the National Gallery of Art) there is no link between “the real thing”and this manipulation. Nor does the author of the site provide any details about theindividual work, its size or its location. The only background provided is a briefbiography of the artist. Obviously, these images were created with a thesis in mind,for much care was taken in altering the original visual representation of this work ofart. But this point is not clear from this web site. While Malek isn’t making a claimto be “the real thing’ – indeed he’s asserting an illusion – he also isn’t accurately

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Figure 3. Not only does Mark Harden’s Artchive <www.artchive.com/> (formerly thetexas.net Museum of Art <lonestar.texas.net/∼mharden/> [Sept. 1997] have a level of graphicdesign that leads it to read as a museum site, but it appropriates the floor plan of the NationalGallery of Art, West Building.

representing the original work of art, either. Whatever the goal of this alteration, itsevocative power would be strengthened by a link to a faithful reproduction.


Figure 4. The Art Galaxy, virtual gallery <www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/∼malek/Artfolder>[Sept. 1997]. Note that all the works are presented in uniform size.

Don’t Fence Me In

On their own, and taken as individual instances, these small scale, simply virtualgalleries should not cause a great deal of concern for museums. In fact, museumshave something to learn from the many personalized museum-like installationsthat are appearing on the Web, for they point out a need to interpret and contex-tualize works in an individualized space. As Peter Walsh has reminded us, theWeb can provide museums with an alternative to the “Unassailable Voice” ofmuseum authority.5 Walsh rightly points out that the Web provides an opportunityto stop speaking in the voice of the all-knowing narrator, familiar to all of usfrom AcoustiguideTM tours or Educational Television, and to incorporate multipleperspectives and visitor feedback into interpretive programs.

Loosing some historical baggage might not be a bad thing for museums asthey re-create themselves on the Web, but how are people supposed to identifythe real thing? Where does the museum’s traditional role as custodian and inter-preter of cultural heritage fit in the highly diversified information frontier? How canmuseums best use the web to communicate, and accommodate diverging points ofview, without sacrificing educational and interpretive goals, or compromising themoral rights of the artists whose works are in care? Disorientation is often the primesentiment of a web surfer. Museums have an opportunity to provide a touchstone.

5 Peter Walsh, “The Web and the Unassailable Voice”Archives and Museum Informatics: thecultural heritage informalics quarterlyVol. 11, no 2, reprinted inMuseums and the Web 97: SelectedPapers, Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1997, pp. 69–76.

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Figure 5. Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party, reproduced from the Anaglyph Galleryof the Art Galaxy <http.//www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/∼malek/Illusions/RedBlue/Impression/Cassatt/Cassatt1rb.html> [Sept. 1997] The web page author has signed the manipulated workin the lower left corner.

Provide a Good Foundation

The key to a good museum site, and what sets it apart from many of thesites of individual art enthusiasts, is the depth and breadth of the content thatmuseums can provide. Reproductions of Mary Cassatt’sBoating Partycan befound at the Art Galaxy site6, in the Web Museum,7 as part of Mark Harden’s

6 See <www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/∼malek/Artfolder/cassat9.htm> [Sept. 1997], identified onlyasThe Boating Party, and reproduced as a JPEG <www.mcs.cushayward.edu/∼malek/cassat9.jpg>[Sept. 1997] of 699× 540 pixels.

7 See <sunsite.unc.edu/louvre/paint/auth/cassatt/> [Sept. 1997] identified as The BoatingParty/1893–1894 (130 Kb); Oil on canvas, 90.2× 117.5 cm (35 1/2× 46 1/in); NationalGallery of Art, Washington and accompanied by a thumbnail image and a JPEG <sunsite.unc.edu/louvre/paint/auth/cassatt/boating.jpg> [Sept. 1997] of 1042× 786 pixels.


Artichive8 and on a number of other personal home pages. What sets apart theexploration of the painting at the National Gallery of Art is the interpretation andcontext provided.

A main page introduces the painting,9 [Figure 6] and provides links to a numberof other types of information: a full screen image, a number of details, [Figure 7]a detailed bibliography, exhibition history, provenance (including links to otherworks from the Chester Dale Collection), and the location where the work hangsin the Gallery. In addition to this somewhat scholarly art historical information,the work is placed in context the context of a tour, of the work of “Mary Cassattand Auguste Renoir”, that explores both artists’ interest in scenes of everyday life[Figure 8].

The work comes alive, however, in the narration by Phillip Conisbee, Curatorof French paintings at the National Gallery of Art, available in an audio clip. Herelates the painting compositionally to the Japanese woodblock prints that had suchan influence on Cassatt. Pointing out the high horizon line and the angled forms thatflow out of the frame, his reference to this visual precedent prompts a query of theNGA collection for examples – one that unfortunately yielded an unsatisfactoryresult, because the information given in the narrative was not precise enough toinform a meaningful database query. A link to a known work would have beenmore helpful.

Another significant point in Conisbee’s analysis is also lost: a narrative refer-ence to Manet’sBoating, now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, is unaccompanied by an image, or any means to follow up the relationshipbetween these painters or their work. In both cases, the limitations of one medium– either print or audio – have provided false boundaries in a new multimedia space.Rather than leading to richer detail to explore, both leave the visitor intrigued butunsatisfied.

It becomes clear that access to “the real thing” includes the ability to demon-strate its physicality [through view of brushstrokes, for example]. Close proximityalso enables the development of knowledge about a work, that, when communi-cated in meaningful way, sets the museum site apart from others. Some aspectsof the museum’s interpretation of ‘the real thing” become discernible in the seaof images because of the context that surrounds it. But the ‘realness’ in detail andcontext is not dependent upon the ‘thingness’ that is granted by custody of theoriginal work itself. A scholar with good reference works to hand could constructa similar inter-woven narrative about this Mary Cassatt painting.

8 See <www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cassatt.html> [Aug. 1998], identified as CASSATT,Mary/The Boating Party/1893–1894/Oil on canvas/90.2× 117.5 cm (35 1/2× 46 1/4 in.) andaccompanied by a JPEG boating.jpg (1042× 786) [Aug. 1998].

9 See <www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object = 46286 + 0 + none> [Sept. 1997] where the workis identified as “Mary Cassatt/American, 1844–1926/The Boating Party, 1893/1894/oil on canvas,0.900× 1.173 m (35 7/16× 46 1/8 in.)/Chester Dale Collection/1963.10.94” and accompanied by athumbnail image (190× 172 pixels).

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Figure 6. The main screen for Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party, from <www.nga.gov>[Sept. 1997] with links to a full screen image, details, bibliography, exhibition history,location in the gallery, provenance, the tour where the work is featured a narrative descriptionof the painting, and a link to the bookstore, were it is possible to purchase a reproduction ofthe work. © Copyright National Gallery of Art. Reproduced with permission.


Figure 7. Details of Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party, allow a closer look at the surface of thepainting, and the handling of the broad areas of color mentioned in the narration. It is possibleto select a specific detail to view at screen size. Thus, in the image of the side of the man’sface, the brushwork and application of the paint becomes visible. See <www.nga.gov> [Sept.1997] © Copyright National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Museums are learning, however, to explore the ‘thingness’ or artefactualityof the works in their care. They can build up knowledge of the physical make-up of works of art through interpretive installations about their conservation orrestoration, and through the distribution of images that show a work from multiplepoints of view, or in different lighting conditions. Detailed knowledge about theactual construction of a work is one of the keys to establishing its authenticity. Ina paper on “The Future of the Past Archaeology and Anthropology on the Web”,John Hoopes posits that “virtual reality might face stiff competition from virtualtours of reality”10 if museums made remote sensing devices, microscopes, andgallery cameras available to their networked visitors. The Exploratorium in SanFrancisco <www.exploratorium.org> has also used the Web successfully to makethe large small (and bring the Hubble Space Telescope Service Mission to the floorof their exhibit space), and to make the small, large (through an on-line cow’s eyedissection).

10 John Hoopes, “The Future of the Past: Archaeology and Anthropology on the Web,”Msueumsand the Web 97: Selected Papers, Pittsburgh: PA, Archives & Museum Informatics, 1997, pp. 279–292, reprinted fromArchives and Museum Informatics; a cultural heritage informatics quarterly,vol. 11, no. 2, 1997.

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Figure 8. The opening screen of the tour “Mary Cassatt, Auguste Renoir” from www.nga.gov.This sequence of images highlights the artists’ exploration of everyday themes and subjectmatter, and helps give the scholarly descriptions of the individual works some context. See<www.ng.gov> [Sept. 1997] © Copyright National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Build Bridges and Pathways

Providing experiences in museums that can’t be had elsewhere is one way to drawvisitors into cultural heritage web sites. Building museum-to-museum connectionsensures that the web that a visitor then follows is one of trusted and authentic links.It should be possible for an individual interested in an artistic theme or personage,to move between the Web sites of collecting and research institutions, learningmore about the works in each collection, and building a sense of meaning andcontext from their inter-relationships.

However, with museums’ traditional focus on specific collections, this remainsone of the weakest points in museum Web sites. What is needed are vehicles thatenable visitors to traverse a cultural information space, and to find information


about themes, artists, time periods, without necessarily limiting their results tosingle collections. As much as this may run counter to traditional instincts to keepmuseums visitors ‘within the walls’, it is critical for the creation of meaningfulpathways into and through digital cultural heritage collections. Finding things onthe Web is as much about the links one follows as the place one starts. If culturalheritage institutions are not building richly interconnected spaces, that reflect theconcerns of visitors – person, place, time, subject, theme – then they risk havingvisitors bypass carefully structured sites, to use the unstructured word-based searchengines as a finding aid instead.

The risk of a majority of users relying on network search engines as their pointof departure is great – for the majority of museum information availablethroughthe Web is not actuallyon the Web. Instead, detailed databases of museum contentare available through search interfaces. While this approach provides a much moreflexible way to deliver dynamic content and manage a growing site, databasedinformation delivery does not mesh with the ‘web crawling’ robots that constructHotbot, Lycos, altaVista, WebCrawler, or Excite – to name just a few of the existingsearch engines.

As a result, museum information looses pride of place to the more thematic-ally oriented personal galleries. A search for information about an artist, such asMary Cassatt, will produce significantly more ‘hits’ from private pages than frommuseums themselves.11

Enable Access by Being Connected

One way of ensuring that museums are creating cultural heritage resources thatcan be located and inter-related is to describe them with metadata that conformsto network-wide standards. Museums need to move ensure that their own discus-sion of documentation standards takes place within the context of the developmentand application of the Dublin Core to the description of many different kinds ofnetworked information. If cultural heritage institutions are part of this discussion,and implement its results, they can ensure that when search engines become moresophisticated, their sites will be found. Making museum information part of abroader landscape will ensure that cultural heritage resources are used alongsidethose of the library or archival community.12

11 Searches made during the preparation of this paper, on popular artists’ names such as Cassattand Seurat, rarely produced a museum site in the top 10 results from any of the search engines.Although replicating specific searches is impossible, given the dynamic nature of the Web and itsdiscovery tools, it is possible to regularly reproduce similar results. The CIMI Dublin Core TestbedProject, that may address some of these issues, was announced in early 1998 after this paper wasgiven: see <www.cimi.org>.

12 For background on the Dublin Core see: www.purl.oclc.org/metadata/Dublin_Core Despite thestrong interest in the Dublin Core <www.purl.oclc.org/metadata/Dublin_Core> as a metadata formatfor information discovery, “DC Simple” strategies for embedding metadata in the headers of webpages do not scale well, and will not address this issue. More sophisticated strategies are necessary.

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Museums also need to ensure that they are enabling access to quality networkedscholarly information rather than erecting barriers to its creation and use. Manyinstitutions are leery about granting rights for the digital use of materials intheir collection, and decline requests to reproduce works in electronic form. Byproviding access to quality visual information, and accompanying it with qualitydocumentation, cultural heritage institutions can contribute to the development ofa literate generation of digital scholars.13 The Msueum Educational Site LicensingProject was an experiment that explored the use of digital museum resoures inhigher education. It’s time, though, to move from projects to programs, however.The Art Museum Image Consortium <www.amico.net> a collaborative initiativeof institutions with collections of art, has begun to work on long-term solutions forenabling educational access to museum multimedia. Museums need to becometheplacefor quality documentation about the material world.14

To accomplish this, museums must to work together to raise their collectiveprofile as part of the information landscape. The Virtual Library: museums pages,now maintained under the auspices of ICOM is a good starting point.15 But itsorientation towards institutions, and its reflection of museums’ collection-basedmyopic perspective ensures that VLmp is not meeting the needs of a significantbody of museum visitors.16

See D. Bearman and J. Trant, “Unifying cultural memory: electronic environments could bridgehistorical accidents of collecting institutions” information Landscapes, proceedings of a UKOLNConference [at press].

13 The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) provided an experimental environ-ment within which to explore the delivery of museum content for academic use on campus networks.Details about the MESL final report are available at www.gii.getty.edu/mesl. The significance of thechange in attitude to visual information that we have seen in the higher educational community ispondered by Clfford Lynch in “The Uncertain Future for Digital Visual Collections in the Univer-sity”, Archives and Museum Informatics: a cultural heritage informatics quarterly, Volume 11, no 1,5–13.

14 See the arguments about “getting RICH” in David Bearman, “Museum Strategies for Successon the internet”,Spectra, Vol. 22, no. 4, Summer 1997, 18–24.

15 See www.icom.org/vlmp.16 The difficulty of maintaining this kind of quality index to a domain has been acknowledge,

particularly among the subject-based indexes of the Joint Information Systems Commission projectsin the UK. Criteria for inclusion or exclusion are also inconsistent (see Alison McNab, BetsyAnagnostelis and Alison Cooke, “Never mind the quality, check the badge-width!” inAriadne, Issue9, www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue9/quality-ratings/). Others openly criticize the subject gateway approach.In his opinion piece “Why to avoid quality sites?” Willard McCarty cites three reasons:” (1) theorganisational scheme does not correspond to the way I think, so I have a hard time finding whatI need and think I can do better by specifying keywords; (2) the list maintainer cannot possiblykeep up with the rate at which new items are popping up and changing their addresses; (3) myinterests are not well served by the disciplinary division.” See the AHDS Newsletter, Issue 2, July1997 <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/projects/ahds/background/gateways/whynot.htm>.


As Jane Sledge has pointed out, museums need not know more not just aboutwhat people want to know, but why they want to know it.17 It often appears thatin trying to solve a new problem with an old answer and as a result informationcollected for one purpose is shoehorned into delivery vehicles designed to serveanother. For example, museums have focused a great deal of attention on standardsfor collecting information, and documenting collections, without thinking abouthow to best distribute it, and how to make it relevant to those who use it.18

Time spend on the Web, is time spent exploring the relationships betweenthings. It’s not so much about searching databases as it is exploring informationspaces. Information delivery strategies need to make the most of the relation-ships between and among the works in museum collections. Indexes may providea starting point, but they don’t meet the exploratory needs of many kinds ofusers. Museums need to find ways to ensure that virtual visitors stay within atrusted environment of a cultural heritage web, by actively creating links betweenmuseums sites, and by enhancing collections documentation with the context thatother works of art or artifacts can provide. The cultural heritage Web can be one thatcommunicates the ideas and issues interpreted in museums educational programs;museums can make these interpretations available so that others can link to them.19

Doing so requires connections within museums as well. Museums need to workacross traditional departments, so that documentation specialists and educatorswork together to meaningfully deliver information about collections.

Authentication Tools and Technologies

T networked information community is as yet without a satisfactory means tocommunicate authenticity and reliability in the digital world.20 The flip side ofthe critical faculties developed doing research in other media are often not appliedto electronic information sources. While there may be an ‘aura of authenticity’associated with electronic information, museums must feel that the delivery of

17 J. Sledge, “Points of View”Multimedia Computing and Museums, Selected papers from theThird International Conference on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM95/MCN 95),ed. by David Bearman, Pittsburgh: Archives & Museum Infomatics, 1995, 335–346.

18 The Multimedia Group of the Documentation Committee of the International Council ofMuseums (ICOM/CIDOC/MMG has begun to consider this issue, and has circulated a draft set of“Criteria for Evaluating Museum Multimedia” for comment. See <www.archimuse.com/cidoc/>.

19 The recently published American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional paper No 37,Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship” Achievements, Prospects and Challenges –the United States Focus, by Pamela Pavliscak, Seamus Ross and Charles Henry (1997, availableat http://www.acls.org/op37.htm) makes interesting reading for those who feel they are creatingresources for scholarly use. Further studies of this sort are needed about the information use behaviorof other sectors of the educational community, including undergraduate teaching, high school, andprimary and junior school students.

20 See David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, “Authenticity of Digital Resources: Towards a State-ment of Requirements in the Research Process,” D-Lib Magazine, June 1998, <www.dlib.org./dlib/une98/06bearman.html>.

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quality information is part of their responsibility for interpreting the past. Culturalheritage institutions have to ensure that the information they make available is thebest that it can be, and they must also help others to develop the ability to recognizequality when they see it, and to interpret meaning from electronic information.21

There has been a latent tendency within the electronic information communityto hope for a technological solution to the issue of information authentication.22

Many such vehicles, including watermarks,23 will certainly assist in the post-factoidentification of the source of a particular digital object, or the integrity of a partic-ular digital file. but they will not solve the filtering problem – separating the wheatfrom the chaff – or finding the needle in the proverbial haystack. Digital Objectidentifiers,24 being developed by the Association for American Publishers in part-nership with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the CopyrightClearance Center, also offer some possibility of identifying the provenance of adigital object and tracing its ownership and origin. A consortium of publishersplans to demonstrate the application of the DOI at the Frankfurt Book Fair in thefall of 1997.

However, ownership and quality are not synonymous; watermarking a digitalimage will not ensure that its color balance is correct, that its content is docu-mented, or that its scale in relation to the original is communicated. Nor will itindicate what the source of the digital image was: whether it was scanned from a35 mm slide, a 4× 5 transparency, and 8× 10 transparency, or taken with a digitalcamera back. These aspects of the conversion of a image to digital form are morecritical than a watermark in evaluating the visual information that it contains.25

Another technological approach is PICS, the Platform for Internet ContentSelection. This approach ‘establishes Internet conventions for label formats andmethods”, which enable content ratings to be embedded within documents.26

Designed to allow the filtering of content so that parents could limit what their chil-dren has access to, the PICS architecture has a flexibility that is appealing to anyone

21 The development of critical reading skills when it comes to electronic documents was one ofthe research issues raised recently within the discussions of the electronics records community. SeeDavid Bearman and Jennifer Trant, “Electronic Records Research Working Meeting, May 28–30,1997, A Report from the Archives Community” inD-Lib Magazine, July/August 1997, available athttp://www.dlib.org/dlib/july97/07bearman.html.

22 See for example Peter Graham, “Long Term Intellectual Preservation” July 18, 1995 availableat http://aultnis.rutgers, edu/texts/dps.html.

23 Many watermarking schemes are now in existence. Two that offer registry services inter-nationally are Digimarc, <www.digimarc.com> in the US and High Water Signum <www.highwatersignum.com> in the UK.

24 See www.doi.org for background and details about the Digital Object Identifier.25 Whatermarks can help ease anxieties about making high-quality visual information available in

digital form, however, as they enable the identification of the source of a particular copy of a digitalimage, and thus allow an institution to prove appropriation or misuse.

26 See Paul Resnick and James Miller, “PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship”,Communications of the ACM, 1996, vol. 39(10), pp. 87–93. <http:/www.w3.org/PICS/iacwcv2.htm>.


concerned with the creation of trusted networks of authoritative information.However, museums can’t rely upon technology to create the needed informationgenre – the quality cultural heritage Web site. Instead, cultural heritage institutionshave to look to themselves and each other to build an interlocking series of pathsand links that move the visitor through an information space that is recognizableas trustworthy, and interesting.

Opening Doors

Concern for the authenticity and accuracy of museum information must not stiflecreativity, or hamper museums’ ability to enliven the experiences of the visitor.Indeed, the narrator’s voice, one of the most interesting aspects of the Web siteat the National Gallery of Art comes very close to the “unassailable”. As well ascommunicating what is known about the collections, museums must remain opento what other know and interpret. One particularly welcoming approach in use atthe Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco, asks visitors to “Tell us what you know”and employs feedback buttons that allow the visitor to add keywords that describethe image, and provide information about the artist or the work itself.27

Interactive devices, that allow the user to engage with the information presented,draw them in to new experiences and spaces. User-sensitive feedback mechanisms,such as the ILEX system in development at the University of Edinburgh28 arecritical to presenting information that appears appropriate and relevant to an indi-vidual’s experience and circumstances, and that respond to explicitly or implicitlyexpressed interests. Museums need to enliven their web sites with ways to giveback some control; to do so is disassociate authority and quality.

New Models

It is clear that new models for creating a distributed cultural heritage informationweb are needed – models that integrate the holdings of all museums. One model,that recognizes the educational potential of a unified library of digital museumcontent is the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO). AMICO was foundedin the fall of 1997 to provide educational access to cultural heritage informa-tion by creating, maintaining and licensing, a collective digital library of imagesand documentation of works of art. Formed as a self-governed, not-for-profitcorporation, AMICO enables its members to further their educational missions

27 See www.thinker.org.28 Described by Janet Hitzeman et al. in “Dynamic Generation of Museum Web Pages: the Intelli-

gent Internet Explorer” inMuseums and the Web, 1997, Selected Papers, Pittsburgh, PA: Archives &Museum Informatics, 1997, 253–260 (reprinted fromArchives and Museum Informatics: the culturalheritage information quarterly, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1997) and Jon Oberlander et al., “Exploring a gallerywith intelligent labels”,Virtual Interactive Experiences and Real Museums: Selected Papers fromICHIM97, Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1997.

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by: creating a collective library of art from North American museums for use ineducation at all levels; providing members access to each others holdings and tothe contents of museums in other countries for their own educational uses; negoti-ating digital rights with artists, artist rights societies, artists estates and other rightsholders; providing its members’ access to collective funding to pursue their educa-tional missions, and enhancing the information infrastructures and documentationpractices of members.

Joining AMICO can also help individual museums move into the networkedinformation world by reducing technology risks through collective decision-making; adopting common standards and guidelines and sharing expertise, andcreating opportunities for collaborating with technology firms, funding sources,standards organizations, telecommunication providers and others. full and Asso-ciate Membership in AMICO enables both small and large museums, the wellprepared and the novice, to participate.

AMICO’s primary goal is to create a library of digital documentationfrom museums for use by educational users. (The Consortium has a non-exclusive educational use license to contributed multimedia documentation fromits members.) Services delivered to members will help in their preparation.AMICO will provide “best practice” guidelines, “frequently asked questions”,standards for data capture; assist in data value standardization, such as indexing,metadata augmentation, thesaural explosion of terms in controlled vocabularies,and mapping institutional data to export standards, and create a publicly accessiblecatalog of the Library that facilitates the negotiation of further rights from museummembers. AMICO Members will also collaborate to define minimum rightsmanagement data requirements, negotiate rights with individual rights holders andtheir collectives; write model licensing agreements; provide a forum for developinglicenses for schools and school districts; and develop and disseminate end-usertraining materials. AMICO members and Library users will work together todevelop an understanding of the use of museum multimedia in education, by:monitoring and analyzing uses and users; conducting focus groups to identify usersneeds; and promoting innovative educational uses of museum digital content.

AMICO’s framework is one in which museums work together to enable educa-tional users to gain access to their multimedia documentation, enable the Libraryto be comprised of contributions from many different collections. Redesigninginformation delivery to the educational sector reflects a need to rethink traditionalapproaches to the design and delivery of information throughout the museum.

Conclusions

Writing about the approach taken to the development of the new CDVoices &Images of California ArtPeter Samis of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Artsaid:


I know our program was a departure from the standard collection-basedmuseum CD-ROM/multimedia experience, and our decision to focus narrowlyan in great depth – with more than an hour’s worth of assets devoted to each ofonly eight artists – was a bit risky. As a result, we left many important artistsand works out of our first multimedia publication, and included many worksand resources that are not even in the museum’s holdings. But it seems to beworking: a group of teachers has designed a curriculum based on the CD thatcuts across subject areas (and even encourages uniting them in inter-teachercollaborations) . . . [this is] fertile ground for us as museum educators: givingour audiences the tools to construct their own meanings, which include, but arefar from exhausted by, those that we ourselves might attribute to the works inour care.29

Museums need to find a way to move the knowledge they hold of art and culture outbeyond their walls, and into a new set of spaces. Networked information space isthe natural place of discourse for the next generation; chat rooms are as comfortableas the mall was to the generation previously, and the coffeehouse to the one beforethat. If cultural heritage institutions are to ensure that these network experiences arebased on reality as much as on virtual reality, they have to make their collectionsand the way they communicate about them accessible and relevant.

Authenticity has its roots in trust. To develop a trust in cultural informationresources in the generation now being educated, museums must encourage usersto expect a challenging, interesting and enjoyable experience, and enable themto make critical judgments about the meaning of the world around them, asreflected in the unique works of art and artifacts in museum collections. Perhapsit’s not about having “The Real Thing” at all, but about having “The Right Stuff”.Museums are seeing others with access to information about their collections workre-present them in ways that are personally find meaningful. Museums need tofind a way to set their sites apart. The challenge is to set museums’ sights onthe development of a new set of symbols, a new vocabulary that allows museumcollections to speak in a narrative and/or and interconnected (hyper) informationspace, constructed by and for the visitor. Using new netroked informationtools,cultural heritage institutions could weave a web of new realities and interpretations,that communicates the magic of the material past to a generation comfortable in animmaterial world.

29 From a posting by Peter Samis, Program Manager, Interactive Educational Technologies, SanFrancisco Museum of Modern Art, to museum–[email protected], 18 Jun, 1997, with the title“RE: Interpretation & Constructivist approaches”.

When all You've Got is “The Real Thing”: Museums and Authenticity in the Networked World

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