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Hi all,

Here is some text from an email I sent to Joe regarding some of the more pragmatic details of running a museum. If you have any comments or suggestions please post them.

"This is a museum, and as such it will house a collection of various exhibits. What I can offer is:

1. a scheme for organizing this art (although this would require some input, as I am not an artist)
2. a system for maintaining the collection (like a database of all of the exhibits, and this system would include methods for adding new exhibits and applying the organization scheme)
3. a virtual representation of the museum (so a website. But not just a website, but a website that is built to manage collections of data, or in our case, art).

Now let me make my case for these services. The museum needs supporters that are not just contributors. I think a solid virtual representation of the museum would be a great thing to show prospective supporters (i.e. people with money), and the kind of representation I have in mind is more than just a web page with pictures of paintings. But more on that in a few paragraphs.

Also, as we discussed, I think a organization method would be extremely necessary if this is to be used as any kind of tool in the academic study of art. Artists may not appreciate having their works categorized, but people who actually use museums do, and if you have any more than a small amount of works collected, the benefits will be obvious (improved searching, citing, and comparing being the most obvious). This scheme really has nothing to do with the creation of art, and more with the administration of a museum.

I've been working on a demo of a website/organization system. In a large museum these would be two separate yet interconnected systems, but for starting out I think a tool that does both would better suit the needs of the museum. I'm working on something now that performs these two functions, but right now it's just local on my computer so I don't have a web-address to point you to. On one hand, it acts as just a tool to keep track of what we have in the museum. It creates a record for each exhibit, which includes data about the art itself, pictures, and any information relating to its physical presence in the museum. It also will contain a simple interface for adding new records to the collection.

It will also serve as a website for the museum (or rather a virtual representation of the museum). It can provide users a number of searching and browsing methods for using the collection, while maintaining all of the data associated with each record. Plus with the help of some artsy folks, it could look however you wanted it to, and it leaves open the possibility of new features to be implemented (I'm just thinking out loud here, but stuff like "automatically link this piece to your facebook account" or "export the data for this piece so it can be cited in a scholarly paper" or "comment on this art"). And anything else you would want on this website could certainly be incorporated. I'll let you know when I have something better to show you."