Inside Gallery One

Museums and the Web at the

Cleveland Museum of Art

What is Gallery One?

Project Facts

• Large scale and ambition

• Appetite for taking chances

• Ten million dollar budget

Project Goals• Create a nexus of interpretation, learning, and audience

development

• Build audiences—including families, youth, school groups, and occasional visitors—by providing a fun and engaging environment for visitors with all levels of knowledge about art

• Highlight featured artworks in a visitor-centered and -layered interpretive manner, thereby bringing those artworks to the Greater Cleveland community and the world.

• Propel visitors into the primary galleries with greater enthusiasm, understanding, and excitement about the collection

• Develop and galvanize visitor interest, bringing visitors back to the museum again and again

The Beacon

Studio Play

Studio Play

Studio Play

The Lenses

The Collection Wall

ArtLens App

Download the ArtLens iPad App from the iTunes store.

ArtLens App

Workshops

“Everyone I met, from the Director on down, was able to talk knowledgeably about the project. It was clear how much of a museum-wide endeavor Gallery One was, and that may be it’s greatest accomplishment.”

- Ed Rodley,

Associate Director of Integrated Media at Peabody Essex Museum

Designing for Immersive Experience

• Boil down to basics. Keep focus on the objects. What? How? Why?

• Not all visitors want to look at objects in the same way.

• Different types of immersion. Wanderer one day, seeker another.

Developing Rich Content for Mobile Experiences

• Most users are in Northeast Ohio

• Many international users will never visit the physical building.

• For international users, ArtLens is the CMA

The Collection Wall: The Road to Digital Capture

• Digitization push piggybacks on expansion/renovation of CMA beginning in 2003

• Anything that gets reinstalled gets re-digitized

• Yields consistent images of the permanent collection, ideal for use in a unified presentation layer

• Digitization is just one example of a more practical facet without which something like Gallery One wouldn’t be possible--metadata, inventory, good data

Content Managment, Content on Demand

Evaluating Digital Technologies

• Usability tests of all interactives

• Observations

• Skype conversations with offsite users of ArtLens (qualitative)

What Worked, What Didn’t

• On time

• On budget

• On target

• Fun, playful, memorable

• Technical issues

• Offsite usage?

• Are visitors interacting and then going to take a closer look at the artworks?

Future

• Gallery One transforming the role of digital media in 21st century museum practice.

• Will influence the institution and field for years to come.

Thank You