As part of one of my grad courses, we have to write an exhibit review for a local museum (Ordinary People by Extraordinary Artists: Works on Paper by Degas, Renoir and Friends at the Detroit Institute of Arts). While I was looking at an artist from the exhibit on Google Art Project, I found the entire exhibit, including labels and pieces, as presented by the DIA. I just wanted to open discussion on what you all, as historians, think about this emerging platform in terms of opening new avenues for museum exhibitions as well as an accessible space for exploring art.
Personally, I like that availability as well as the extremely high resolution photographs available (just try the zoom feature on this Cézanne, seriously amazing...a great tool for professors in large (or small) seminars to really look at the textures of a painting). On the other hand, I wish I could use the images for research papers. You can't copy/paste the images, which I understand the issues of copyright; but it would be nice to have a feature to request limited access to reproduce images for scholarship. I also wish there was more. The current selection is only a portion of what's out there, so any research capabities are rather limited.
I really enjoy the digital options that are appearing for the presentation of exhibits digitally. It's a great way to reach a much larger audience. Even if a visitor comes to see an exhibit in person, they will still be able to visit the same exhibit online, go over the material again, or share it with friends.
I mean, I think it's great. More and more museums are creating digital exhibits, both complementing their physical exhibits, or completely independently. I imagine the trend will continue to grow.
As someone who's educated in history, archaeology and museology, I have a great deal of opinions on this, both for and against. Let's start with the positives. One of the greatest problems for the museum world is to include everyone in their exhibitions. Museums are often too far away, too expensive, "not for me", takes too much time or only for educated people. The latter is seldom true, but a lot of people (read: adults) refrain from going to museums for the fear of appearing stupid. Now, with Digital Museums we get rid of most of those problems. They are (so far) free, you can access them from the confinement of your own home, you can easily access them to see if they are of interest to you and if you find they aren't, you havn't lost more than perhaps five minutes of your time.
Furthermore, almost every history museum houses tens of thousands of objects, archaeological museums often have millions of different pieces in their databases. When you visit a physical museum, you only get to see a very small percentage of that, selected by a professional based on things like: "does this object tell a story?", "is it appealing?", "what do we know of this object?" and a myriad of other questions. Showing these objects are mostly about two different issues. First there is the simple issue of space, you are physically limited by the available space in the museum when making an exhibition. Secondly, there is the problem of museum fatigue, which is the phenomenon of how much information a visitor can take in during a certain time period; thus showing 20.000 objects in a physical museum is both impossible and pointless.
The Digital Museum solves this problem. Since the museum is in digital form, there is no real time constraint, you are completely free to come and go as you want, meaning that you potentially could visit the same museum 10 times in a weekend, leaving you well enough time to rest your mind whenever you get tired. Also, since it's digital, you can actually publish all the objects the museum has in it's collections. You can even reuse the same object in several exhibits, should you find it beneficial.
As you know, museums aren't only about small objects, some of them house really big things that aren't necessarily open for the public to access (although they can look at them from behind a rope or fence). With a digital museum though, you can suddenly make all of these available. To give some examples, things like the Vasa, the Mary Rose, or the Mausoleum of Augustus could become open to the public - in digital form.
Those are some of the positive aspects that a digital museum comes with. Seems pretty good right? Well, here are some of the downsides. First of all, digitalizing a museum collection of millions of objects is a behemoth task. Even in their current state, when all it's about is to put information about the objects into a database, the task takes an eternity (figuratively). Museums simply don't have the manpower to digitalize their full collections within a reasonable timeframe.
Another problem with the digital museum is that it takes away the authentic feeling. I brought up a few museums that could be improved by the addition of digital media. Well, what about a museum like the Titanic Belfast? If this museum was transformed from a physical museum to a digital museum, what would be the point in even visiting the site? I mean, you could just watch a Titanic documentary of the real deal, or even watch the all so beloved movie from 1997.
Still on the subject of authenticity, one of the things that draws people to museums is the strange feeling of being connected to the people who used the objects on display in the museums. A feeling that is further enhanced if the visitors are allowed to touch objects. A prospect that is far less ludicrous than the older generation of museum personnel will have you believe. Things like pottery sherds, broken pieces of wood, stone tablets with inscriptions, bullets, and a bunch of other things that the museums have in abundance, could easily be made available to physical interaction for the public (in small amounts of course). That is not possible with a digital museum.
A digital museum is not social. Yes, I realise I'm not preaching to the choir when I'm stating that to redditors, but bear with me. A lot of people visit museums as a way of socializing. Whether it is to hang out with friends, to spend quality time with the family or even to date. Either way, the atmosphere that the physical museum provides is important for these people, and atmosphere that cannot be replaced by chat rooms or avatars that might be added to a digital museum.
I think I'll end it there, I can go on with tons of additional pros and cons, but if I start talking ethics this is not going to end! :)