Sidebars
Reaching Beyond the Museum Walls
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been utilizing digital media in a variety of ways. The aim is not only to attract people to the museum but also to build what Digital Media Creative Director Allegra Burnette calls an "online venue" for those unable to come and experience it firsthand. One of the museum's latest initiatives is to make its audio tour available on visitors' iPhones. "We've been thinking about the content we have and the variety of ways we can present it," says Burnette. "It's about taking and repurposing content."
This has led to a host of digital media forays, each reusing existing content and adapting it to different formats. The museum now has more than 100 videos on YouTube, often using high-definition video compressed for the purposes of the site. These videos include interviews with artists and promotions of its film programs. In turn, the videos get embedded in blogs on social networking sites. The museum also has a Facebook site with more than 20,000 members.
One of the more successful ventures has been to make existing podcast content and other audio and video materials available over iTunes U - the educational area of Apple's iTunes download store. Since the museum launched its own channel in October 2007, some 225,000 audio and video tracks have been downloaded, claims Burnette, including public lectures and panel discussions, clips of exhibition installations, and programs from the museum's affiliate Internet radio station.
Potential digital media applications are limitless, but how hard is all this to pull off? “It's not hard to distribute content to different media,” Burnette maintains. “But it's critical to have a solid infrastructure.” To create multiple formats for different devices and media, the museum is building a central database to form “one source with many outputs.”
A new idea for deploying digital media may be highly adventurous, but Burnette believes the main thing is to work out how many people will really use it. Organizations should never be afraid to ask: “Is it worth it?”
