Once the website changes have been made, Steinbach vows to focus on other efforts. Within the next year, he hopes to integrate the museum’s retail, finance and ticketing systems. By early 2001, he plans to revamp the museum’s distance education program, expanding its videoconferencing curriculum for students who cannot visit the museum.

Last, Steinbach boasts idealistically about unveiling a new initiative to invest in technologies that attempt to bridge the gap between art and its observers. Everyone sees artwork differently, he says, and eventually technologists should be able to use their craft to customize the museum experience for every visitor. When pressed to explain how this might work, Steinbach is surprisingly at a loss for words; he knows it can be done, but so far, he hasn’t figured out how to do it. That, he says, is precisely why he plans to raise awareness through a symposium and other research forums.

"IT gives us so much. Someday we’ll have to be able to figure out how to use it to make every person’s visit different," he says. "Do I know how to do that? Not yet. But that’s the beauty of technology. What we don’t know today, we will know three years from now. There was a time when digitizing paintings seemed nuts. The fact that that’s now in our [stable] of talents is a testament to the kind of role technology will play in the future of museums as a whole."