Throughout the museum, news of the initiative has art fiends giggling like schoolchildren. Stebich and other officials are touting the project as "the next big thing," and board members are already sizing up a marketing plan. Bruce Christman, the CMA’s chief conservator, says the digital images should make his job easier, greatly prolonging the life of every object the museum owns. "If you have a good digital image, it cuts down on everyone’s need to handle it," he says. "From my perspective, that’s great news."

Still, with so many digital images, the CMA runs the risk of inadvertently altering an object’s natural colors. Experts such as Johnston warn that the digitizing process dulls colors to the point where a trained eye cannot match them to those on the original. To eliminate the possibility of color or image distortion, Steinbach has signed a partnership with E-Color, a San Francisco-based company that uses electronic cookies’ to produce color-corrected images so that objects appear exactly the same from one computer to the next. While Steinbach says this technology does not reproduce the experience of viewing art in person, he notes that it can make "quite a difference" while viewing art online.

Modernist Looks Ahead

Listening to Steinbach talk about E-Color and his Digital Imaging Initiative is like listening to a teenager talk about his first love. Steinbach considers digitizing the CMA’s collection his "pet project," and never being one for modesty, he rarely passes on an opportunity to discuss it. Still, he is equally animated when outlining some of the other IT projects on tap for the future—further improvements to the website, exhaustive systems integration, expanded distance learning and trailblazing research in the area of cognitive science.

The first of these efforts is the next step in a constant plan to improve the CMA’s presence online. Already, Steinbach has created a special New Media Initiatives division within the IT department. And in September, the museum was scheduled to broadcast its first live Web event, a series of lectures at a memorial conference for former CMA Director Robert Bergman. Later this fall, technologists plan to launch a special section, which Steinbach says will take Web visitors on a virtual tour of behind-the-scenes hot spots such as the restoration room, the conservation department and collections, where Suzor and her colleagues rely on the Apelles system to catalog information about objects themselves.

"To the casual eye, we have a bunch of hooks with paintings on the wall," says Steinbach. "In reality, there’s much more to a museum we feel people should know."