Art and dashboards

The tour of open (visible) storage yesterday at the Luce Foundation Center at the American Art was pretty amazing. The objects (including sculpture, paintings, and folk art) are behind plexi allowing for all conservation issues such climate and light control to be addressed. Since it is storage, not an exhibit, labels are kept to a minimum; most have only artist, title, accession number, and occasionally year. Computer terminals are scattered throughout the area, allowing for people to look up specific artworks using the accession number to get more information. Visitors can create a scrapbook of works of interest and email it to themselves. Our tour guide noted that visitors seem to like the behind-the-scenes sort of feel, as well as providing study opportunities.

This morning's session consisted of people for several different organizations discussing recent digital projects. Some were gallery specific uses of technology, which were interesting in design but not of particular interest for our purposes. The one I found most interesting and of possible use for us is the creation of a Dashboard by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I'll share more about these presentation later.