The Staedel goes for Museum 2.0

Are museums and the Internet really incompatible partners? Max Hollein, director of the Staedel art museum in Frankfurt, Germany, doesn’t think so, but he says that museums often commit two conceptual errors when they think about their Web strategy.
Either they attempt to create a virtual copy of a real stroll through an exhibition or else they aim to use the Internet as an advertising medium to attract more visitors.
“The former is relatively uninteresting, the latter doesn’t work,” says Hollein, who’s preparing the Staedel for its 200th anniversary festivities in 2015.
Not only has Germany some of the world’s greatest art collections, but it also takes the idea of re-inventing the museum seriously. For its jubilee year the Staedel museum is planning a range of innovations, some of which Hollein has previewed.
“The museum’s digital expansion will be our major topic of the next year and a half,” he says. Already the Staedel has built up an online presence in every area – 16,500 Facebook friends, 7,500 Twitter followers and 86,000 regular readers of the Staedel’s blog, not to mention the 350,000 video call-ups on YouTube.
This year two further types of Web outreach will be added. There will be a computer learning game for children in what the museum calls “a contemporary method of early aesthetic education”, and online courses for adults to help them prepare for attending an exhibition.
As Professor Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, a staff member at the Institute for Museum Research as well as a board member of the Federation of German Museums notes, not every museum is as active as the Staedel.
Some don’t even have a data bank and only a few list their collections online. Only a minority is active on the social media.
At the Staedel, those who purchase a ticket online can download a course free of charge, be it one about Raphael’s etching techniques or Albrecht Durer’s biography. The aim, Hollein says, is to “enable people to have a knowledgeable visit” at the museum.
An audio guide – there’s a charge for this – on the current “Durer” exhibition can be downloaded on a visitor’s smartphone and listened to again later on.
The most important project is to set up a digital platform for the museum’s display items. This spring a beta version will be introduced. In jubilee year 2015, the platform will be available to all. The German state of Hesse has invested 1.5 million euros (Bt68 million) in the project, in which Software AG and Darmstadt University are also involved.
Since the past summer, Staedel staff members and their colleagues from the German Documentation Centre for Art History have been busy documenting the Staedel’s collection – each painting being given around 80 keywords.
This will permit online visitors to browse through the Staedel’s entire art collection – 99 per cent of which is not on display in the museum galleries but is kept in storage. Click by click, a viewer can browse back and forth through artists’ names and works of every epoch of art history. Those who click on a video receive more film material than those who chiefly want to read scholarly texts.
Darmstadt University media-system developer Thorsten Froehlich stresses that the platform is not a picture gallery like the Google Art Project.
“With our platform you proceed via association, something that is totally new. We call it ‘finding without searching’. You are seduced into getting lost.”
In Hollein’s view such “digital meandering” makes possible a new way of viewing art – by association. This, he stresses, does not compete with a real museum visit.
The New York Times recently hailed Frankfurt as one of the world’s top 10 places to visit, in large part because of the fine art.
Museum researcher Hagedorn-Saupe would like to see an Internet platform like the Staedel’s for every museum in Germany.
“The country’s libraries are much farther advanced,” she says, noting that they long ago began collaborating, as opposed to museums that remain fixated on their own collections. In literature there is the German digital library. In art there are just islands of knowledge.
“We need an access point for Germany’s cultural heritage,” Hagedorn-Saupe says. “This would also mean having one central portal for museum collections.”