Nothing has affected the way American museums do business like the Internet, which is now being used for everything from showing artifacts and conducting research to hawking merchandise and hustling pledges.
David Allison, curator for information and technology at the Smithsonian-American Museum of History in Washington, D.C., can’t recall anything in the field that’s had a similar impact. “I believe the relationship between physical space and virtual space is one of the absolute central issues for all museums in the 21st Century, and there are going to be a lot of changes,” he said.
“We’re seeing a revolution, really,” said Richard Rinehart, a director with the Museum Computer Network, a national organization that’s followed developments in the field for nearly 30 years. “Museums are having to completely redefine who they are as well as who are their audiences.”
In an unlikely setting — the gritty, Rust Belt city of Toledo, a burg of 340,000 known for its Great Lakes shipping, manufacture of Toledo Scales, and Mudhens baseball team — one of the major new “shots” in this revolution has been fired. It is Toledo’s Attic, a Web site created to serve as an online museum for the city’s colorful, industrial history.
What makes this cyberspace advancement different is this: The founders intend to keep their museum exclusively virtual, or “a museum without walls,” says Attic director Timothy Messer-Kruse. It will never be used to complement a building that houses artifacts for the general public.
In fact, offers of ample, rent-free space in Toledo to house collections for traditional exhibiting have been rejected by the Lucas County-Maumee Valley Historical Society, which is the museum’s chief sponsor. The artifacts that the society does possess are in permanent storage and made available only for legitimate research purposes.
Nearly 15,000 photos, articles, documents and other items of local interest are available to the general public by clicking on Toledo’s Attic (www.history.utoledo.edu/attic).
The site gets 300 daily visitors, according to its trackers, and they average 10 pages per visit, which is considered lengthy by most Internet standards. Another number that’s sure to impress museum insiders is the Toledo Attic’s annual budget: $17,000.
“I don’t know if we’re the wave of the future, but we’re an alternative a lot of cities and other constituencies interested in preserving their heritage should consider,” said Messer-Kruse, who also is the project’s webmaster as well as a labor history professor at the University of Toledo.
The American Association of Museums, an umbrella organization for most established U.S. museums, estimates that by the end of this year over 90 percent of its members, from the Boot Hill Museum in Kansas to the country’s best-known institutions in big cities, will have viable Web sites performing important functions.
“Museums aren’t like libraries or archives, where everything is basically accessible for the visitor,” said Rinehart. “Much of what museums have is out of sight and one of the major considerations has always been what to make available to the public. Now, all of a sudden, everything can be displayed either virtually or in real space.”
That very procedure–using cyberspace to exhibit what isn’t in display cases–is taking place at the Smithsonian, where 140 million objects are in the process of being put on display on Web sites.
“There’s no question the Internet offers a tremendous solution to many problems that have traditionally bedeviled us,” said Allison. “Now we can put everything we have online and people can do their own searches. Another advantage, which you may not think about, is that objects on the Internet can carry more thorough background documentation. As it is now, when items are put on display in real space, we only have room for 15 to 100 word labels.”
Chicago’s major museums have enthusiastically embraced the Internet and, like others across the country, have put it to use in creative ways. This includes virtual tours of their buildings to educational links with classrooms.
The Adler Planetarium, for instance, has made its telescopic observations accessible on a live basis to selected schools. The Chicago Museum of Broadcast Communications now makes its extensive files of TV and radio clips available for download.
“The nature of most museums blends in with the Internet,” said CMBC curator Patrick Roberts, “and I know it comes together very nicely for us. It allows us to do a lot of programs with the public we couldn’t before.”
The Internet also is being used in Chicago museums, as at institutions everywhere else, to generate revenue streams by selling merchandise and soliciting donations and new members. But while most museums are generally up to speed on the information highway, they also like to see members of the public come through the doors.
As far as anyone knows, only one other established museum in the U.S. –an art museum in New York called the Franklin Furnace Archive–is completely virtual, like Toledo’s Attic.
“Whether a virtual museum is really a museum, by definition, is probably open to debate,” said Mark Harmon, president of the Illinois Association of Museums. “I don’t think there’s any question you miss something without an actual exhibit of an artifact. A picture of a B-17 bomber is a lot different than standing next to one.”
Rinehart said it isn’t likely Toledo’s Attic will be enthusiastically embraced by the established museum community. Its low-maintenance existence means fewer jobs, and if such cyber-collections proliferate, it could lead to greater competition for grants.
Toledo’s Attic was launched in 1997; one of the founders was Ernest Weaver, a retired mechanical engineering professor at the University of Toledo and a Lucas County-Maumee Valley Historical Society director. The concept sprung from a discussion on how to celebrate the millennium.
“Toledo’s never had a real history museum, but we wondered, where would we get $3 million for a building, curators, maintenance, whatever?” said Weaver. “Everyone cringed. How could we afford a palace? We really didn’t want to go through all that. Then we thought: Why do we need four walls? Let’s use new technology.
“The fact is, a lot of people in the museum world don’t like the word `attic,'” he added. “The connotation is that there is no order, just a collection of junk. I think it fits us perfectly. We are a collection of everything we can find of Toledo history, and we present it as objectively as we can. We let others put order in it.”
Weaver, like others here, said Toledo’s Attic reflects the city’s labor history, which has been innovative and, as of late, lean. He has rescued objects, such as corporate brochures and portraits of CEOs, from dumpsters. Many companies, he noted, have little interest in their place in history and this sometimes makes research difficult.
Toledo had 1,050 manufacturing establishments in 1900, but led the nation from 1929 to 1933 in loss of manufacturing jobs. Its unemployment rate peaked higher than any other city in the 1930s. In 1915, the city’s Willys Overland sold more cars than any firm in the world except Ford. In 1940, the city ranked No. 1 in the world in number of workers employed in the glass industry.
The city also has had is share of celebrities: George C. Scott, Danny Thomas and Joe E. Brown are just a few. A special feature on legendary race car driver Barney Oldfield, who lived in Toledo, is also being prepared for the Attic.
“Toledo is a terrific city for this concept because it is a place with a deep interest in local history, partly because it has been less transient than most cities,” said Messer-Kruse. “A large proportion of families are extended and can trace multi-generational roots here. It’s also a city, like others in the Rust Belt, that looks backward to its golden age, rather than forward.”
The low overhead allows those involved to concentrate efforts and resources almost solely on their mission: preserving and recording history. The core collection is thousands of photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, journals and maps. A historical “registration day,” in which Toledoans will be invited to bring objects in to be filed–and then take them home–is in the offing.
And even though the museum is a purely technological institution, it still has links to the community. University of Toledo graduate students, who are concentrating on gathering oral histories, have been enlisted to aid the museum, and cameras also have been set up in local corporate lobbies to display items of interest.
Messer-Kruse said virtual museums would never replace “bricks and mortar” museums, just as Internet merchants would never replace the mall or grocery stores. He is sure of one thing, however.
“When we have a board meeting, we don’t sit around discussing for hours how we’re going to find the money to get a new roof,” he said. “We actually talk about history. It’s very stimulating.”
