Drawing On a Large Canvas

Never one to ease into anything, Steinbach launched himself into his new digs immediately. With an IT budget of just over $900,000, he knew he’d have to be creative if he wanted to accomplish big changes quickly. By the end of his first month, he had performed an exhaustive analysis of the museum’s IT infrastructure and recommended minor improvements to many of the basic business systems, such as the applications used to organize membership and business development. He tinkered with Apelles, installed a new credit card processing network and replaced the museum’s telephones. Then he turned his gaze on a larger project: the website (www.cma-oh.org).

Back then, the CMA’s site was nothing spectacular—a few images here, a little text there, and some static information about hours and membership. But Steinbach had big plans, and he hired Boston-based Keane to help turn them into reality. Keane consultants came in, interviewed museum representatives about what they wanted in a website, then worked with website designers at Columbus, Ohio-based Motivo to redesign the site from top to bottom. They added content and digitized more than 350 of the museum’s most popular objects for a virtual gallery to exist only in cyberspace. When the site relaunched this spring, industry experts hailed it as one of the most sophisticated of its kind.

"Theirs is one of the most well-designed sites I’ve seen," says Leslie Johnston, editor of eSpectra, the monthly newsletter of the Museum Computer Network. "For those people who might not be able to pass through Cleveland to see the art in person, it provides a wealth of images and information. Other museums do this, but few of them offer as many images as [the CMA]."

Impressed with the overwhelmingly positive response to the digital images, Steinbach decided to take the project a step further and in March announced plans to digitize every object in the museum’s collection. He dubbed the effort the Digital Imaging Initiative and outlined a five-year plan to create digital facsimiles of more than 40,000 objects and 450,000 slides. He commissioned museum technologists to begin the effort right away. By Aug. 1, they had digitized more than 2,000 objects.

Believe it or not, creating digital images of these items is as easy as it sounds. Curators in the museum’s conservation department photograph the objects with sophisticated digital cameras, tinker with the images in Adobe Photoshop, and upload them to a Sybase database for storage and easy access on the Web. Over the next few months, Steinbach says, the process will only get more complex: Technologists will soon go beneath the surface of many objects, using spectography and X-rays, to create a living record of how the object has deteriorated over the years.