PANEL PRESENTATIONS: CASTING THE NET
PRESENTERS: DAVID GREEN, Executive Director of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage
(NINCH); DEBORAH SEID HOWES, Metropolitan Museum of Art; and
MYLES GORDON, Director of Education of the American Museum
of Natural History.
By: Cassie Rogers
The presenters espoused that museum’s job is to change people's lives by engaging them with the
collection, and that the Web is indispensable to this mission. The Web offers great potential for
presenting the stories of the objects held within the museum to an audience that would otherwise be
limited by distance, resources, or information. But beyond that, there is also the potential for creating
conversations and sustained interaction between visitors, taking people into areas of the museum where
they otherwise couldn’t go, and giving them the tools and framework for inquiry. Museums must work to
transfer the passion, capture the imagination, stimulate the curiosity of the visitor. While museums must
maintain their collections of the objects of the past, the Web offers the opportunity to communicate the
museum’s direction for the future - its evolving identity.
The presenters in this discussion stressed the importance of museums working together to assemble digital
libraries of artwork. These libraries should be more than searchable databases of images with their
accompanying “tombstone” information, but instead should offer such things as interdisciplinary
curricula, meta information regarding the history of the artist and the object, scholarly information, and
links to similar topics and categories. The book The Wired Museum (National Association of Museums)
was cited as a further discussion on this topic. A second phase of sorts is beginning where museums are
working together to provide these extended services online. Initiatives such as the Museum Educational
Site Licensing Project (http://www.gii.getty.edu/mesl/home.html), ArtsNet Minnesota
(http://www.walkerart.org/artsnetmn), and AMICO – Art Museum Image Consortium
(http://www.amico.net) were given as examples of the pooling of resources of museums and universities
to accomplish this difficult endeavor.
Deborah Seid Howes indicated several categories of educational services that have been found to be useful
to k-12 teachers:
Access to images – sites such as the National Gallery of Art providing images searchable by various
categories, distance learning curriculum, and online purchase of reproductions
Classroom relevant content - teacher packets of information which has been digested from scholarly
materials to the appropriate level for teaching various grade levels
Interdisciplinary curricula - lesson plans, help for non-art teachers to lead art projects, facilitation of
communication between teachers
Digital tools – such as games to teach how to search databases
Resources and communication – such as an online reference desk service for locating information
regarding an artist or artwork
MUSUEM EDUCATION AND SCHOLARSHIP
Saturday, March 28, 1998, 9:30-11:00