Virtual Museums with a Personal Impact

This article is from the New York Times
Written by Alex Wright
This article has been edited for formatting purposes

One morning last fall Judson Box woke up early to tend the horses at his farm near Leesburg, Fla. Before he could sit down to breakfast, however, his wife waved him over to the color TV that doubles as their home computer, thanks to an old WebTV setup. As Mr. Box leaned in closer to the grainy 17-inch screen, he started to make out the image of a fireman running through a tunnel.

“I just was knocked for a loop,”’ he recalled. “I said, ‘That’s my son.’ ”

Mr. Box’s son, Gary, died on Sept. 11, 2001, along with 11 of his fellow firefighters from Squad 1 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Now, eight years later, Mr. Box has discovered the only known photo taken of his son that day. A few days earlier a Web user named Erik Troelsen had uploaded the image to Make History, the Web site of the future National September 11 Museum and Memorial.

Since the Make History site began in September, about 1,000 users have contributed more than 3,000 photos, videos and personal stories to it — online submissions that will play a central role in the exhibition space of the bricks-and-mortar museum at ground zero, which is projected to open in 2012.

Make History is perhaps the most notable recent example of a museum tapping the collective energy of Web users to help build its collection. While museums have been experimenting with the Web for years, these projects have often consisted of little more than an exhibit photo gallery or online guestbook. In recent years, however, the rise of social media has given Web users the technological wherewithal to play a more active role in shaping the direction of museum collections.

In Warsaw construction crews have barely broken ground on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, scheduled to open in 2012, but already more than 800 Web users from all over the world have registered with the museum’s Virtual Shtetl  project to help build a collection of more than 30,000 photographs, videos and audio recordings related to life in 1,300 towns with Jewish populations before and after World War II. The museum has recently started gathering photos through Flickr and has opened up its collection through YouTube and Facebook as well.

One day last summer Artur Cyruk was poking around an automotive junkyard in his home province of Podlasie, Poland, when he stumbled across the breastplate of a beautifully preserved 19th-century Torah. He took the object home, logged on to his Virtual Shtetl account and uploaded a photo. Within a few days curators had contacted him about acquiring the breastplate for the museum’s permanent collection.

While only a handful of museums have successfully harnessed Web users to develop their collections, social-media platforms are starting to foster new kinds of interactions between Web audiences and museum curators long accustomed to working only with other experts. 

Last February the Luce Foundation Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum invited Web users to help decide which paintings should be displayed in its visible storage facility, typically frequented by art historians and other scholars. Museum staff created a Flickr group called Fill the Gap, which allows users to suggest items to fill the bare wall spaces left when paintings are removed for conservation or lent to other institutions.

While social-media platforms may open up possibilities for user participation, they also carry the risk of promoting bad information and questionable judgments and of eroding the authority of institutional curators. In this sense museums are grappling with the same technological conundrum as other cultural institutions, like universities, publishers and newspapers: how to reconcile institutional principles of order with the liberating impulses of electronic networks.

In a world in which anyone can add to a museum’s collection, how will curators — and audiences — cope with the potential limitlessness of user-generated material?

“The key is to use constraints,” said Jake Barton, the lead designer for Make History. “Just giving visitors an open mike is the least kind thing you can do. We are asking for people’s experiences, but that doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to share a narrative with the visitor.”

Ultimately, the viability of Web-enabled museum collections may rest on curators’ ability to harness the technologies of participation without compromising their judgment. “There’s a difference between having power and having expertise,” said Ms. Simon, the exhibition designer. “Museums will always have the expertise, but they may have to be willing to share the power.”

Photo from here.