Online, It’s the Mouse That Runs the Museum 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.
FILL THE GAP
Above, a photograph contributed to Make History, the Web site of the future National September 11 Museum and Memorial.
“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 (makehistory.national911memorial.org), 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 (sztetl.org) 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.
Fill the Gap represents a tiny but potentially precedent-setting step for the Smithsonian as a whole, where a larger conversation is starting to percolate around the changing role of curators in a Web 2.0 world. That institution recently began an ambitious initiative called the Smithsonian Commons to develop technologies and licensing agreements that would let visitors download, share and remix the museum’s vast collection of public domain assets. Using the new tools, Web users should be able to annotate images, create personalized views of the collection and export fully licensed images for use on their own Web sites or elsewhere.
The Smithsonian’s new-media director, Michael Edson, described the initiative as a step in the institution’s larger mission to shift “from an authority-centric broadcast platform to one that recognizes the importance of distributive knowledge creation.”
“Distributive knowledge creation” can be a tricky business. 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.
“Many museums fear losing control,” said Nina Simon, a museum exhibition designer who is writing a book about participatory museum experiences.
But while curators may instinctively balk at the anything-goes ethos of the Web, new-media advocates argue that Web participation can actually enhance the value of curatorial judgment. “Curators are starting to realize that they can be challenged by the audience,” said Pascale Bastide, the Paris-based founder of the Museum of Afghan Civilization, an entirely Web-based institution scheduled to make its debut later this year.
The museum will begin as a virtual collection of images drawn from real-world institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre, but once it is up and running it will expand to include contributions from users, Ms. Bastide said. In the hope of soliciting original images from Afghan citizens, it will accept photographs taken with and sent from cellphones, which are far more prevalent in Afghanistan than computers.
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.”
As users started submitting photographs to Make History, for example, the project team identified major themes and used them to create topical categories — “Loved Ones,” “Memorials,” “Vigils,” “The New Skyline” — for images selected from the larger collection. Now visitors can choose whether to peruse these sections assembled by curators or delve deeper into the rest of the archive. In this way the museum hopes to strike a balance between institutional curatorship and user participation.
“This is somewhere between history and bottom-up journalism,” Mr. Barton said.
Mr. Edson agreed that encouraging participation did not have to mean abdicating curatorial control. “I think the public genuinely does want the Smithsonian to assert its authority,” he said, “but in this epoch authority and trust will be granted to institutions differently — through transparency, speed and a public orientation.”
Mr. Edson argued that museums that embraced these Web virtues would start to give rise to new kinds of participatory collections geared not only to casual Web users but to serious researchers as well. “Scholarship will drift towards collections that accept a degree of influence from the outside,” he said.
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.”