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http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/symp3/dietz.shtmlPublications, Reports, Presentations
Gateways, Gatekeepers, and Roles in the Information Omniverse
National Museum of American Art, New Media Initiatives Project
Steve Dietz
Project Director
National Museum of American Art
The National museum of American Art (NMAA) is distributing text and images and providing online services via the commercial network American Online as part of a larger outreach via the "information highway."
As part of its broad mandate for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge," one component of NMAA's national outreach effort is the delivery of published texts, digital images of art objects in the collection, and reference services/two-way communication into homes and offices around the country via the wide area network, America Online. We view the commercial/consumer nature of the network to be not dissimilar to the trade titles of a university press list sold through chain bookstores. Our AOL outreach efforts will be complemented by similar efforts on the Internet, with on-site kiosks and CD-ROM products, alongside traditional print publishing.
NMAA Online is a subset of Smithsonian Online and is the only museum participating as a whole in SI Online. NMAA provides resources in six areas. The main NMAA Online screen has color icon-based access to the following areas (See screen shots and figures that correspond to most of these areas):
"Welcome to NMAA" provides general information about the museum, including current exhibits, the museum's mission statement, and press releases and digitized press photos.
Figure 1
"Tour the Galleries" is a library of over 100 downloadable digitized images of artworks in the collection. The library is subdivided into content areas such as "NMAA Collection Highlights" or "American Landscapes." Each image is presented at screen resolution (72 ppi) in 256 colors (8 bit, custom palette) and includes a copyright notice within the image itself. At the present time, these images cannot be viewed interactively and must be downloaded (approximately 8-20 minutes at 2400 baud) onto the users' hard drive. "Thumbnail catalogs" that only take 2-4 minutes to download up to 16 images are also available in a reduced 16-color palette for previewing the images. Each image is in a GIF format, which can be read on either Mac or DOS/Windows platforms with an appropriate GIF viewer. Each image includes a full caption and extensive descriptive text as part of the download.
Figure 2
"Reference & Online Help" provides information about library and other database resources at NMAA. It is also used extensively for its online reference help, with a wide variety of questions being asked on a daily basis. This is one of the most used resources of NMAA Online.
Figure 3
"Publications" includes the complete text of Free Within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art, by Regenia Perry, excerpted articles from our scholarly journal American Art (no images), the texts of various brochures and other published material, and a complete publications backlist catalog that people can order from.
Figure 4
"With Kids in Mind" reproduces various educational materials and can be used by teachers to help plan class visits to the museum.
Figure 5
"Art Talk" is our interactive area and includes a bulletin board for open discussion of museum-related topics with over 450 postings on more than 30 topics. There is also a weekly art quiz, an area to upload digitized versions of personal artwork for review by a curator, and a live chat area is planned for real time interaction with curators, artists, authors, and other experts.
Figure 6
Results: NMAA Online became available at the end of September 1993. In the first three months, there have been over 10,000 downloads of NMAA GIFs (image files) and viewers have made approximately 40,457 "entries" into the NMAA Online area, spending approximately 2,700 hours there. We are very encouraged by these results and view WANs as an important new way to "publish" information and make it easily available to anyone in the country with a computer, a modem, and a phone line.