New Ways of Seeing — Digitizing the Smithsonian
By Matilda McQuaid and Ken Rahaim
With 138 million objects and specimens, 153,000 cubic feet of archival materials, and two million library volumes — all of which are housed in forty-one facilities operated by nineteen museums and nine research centers — the scale and diversity of Smithsonian collections present a unique digitization challenge. The Digitization Program Office (DPO) was created in 2009 to provide pan-institutional leadership and coordination to increase the quality and quantity of the Smithsonian’s digitized collections, and to implement the Smithsonian’s strategic plan of “Creating a Digital Smithsonian.”
An ongoing series of Mass Digitization Pilot Projects (seven, at the time of publication) has created a safe, cost-efficient, and scalable process that can be tailored to a wide range of collections. The success of those pilot projects led to a series of Production Projects, the first of which included the entire paper-based Bureau of Engraving and Printing collection at the National Museum of American History (273,000 objects), which was completed in early 2015, and the Fern collection of the National Museum of Natural History’s botany specimens (totaling 260,000), with ongoing work to digitize all 3.5 million specimens of the U.S. National Herbarium collection.
The first entire-museum digitization effort was initiated in collaboration with Cooper Hewitt in late 2014. With the major part of the project completed a mere eighteen months later in early 2016, over 180,000 museum objects have been successfully digitized from Cooper Hewitt’s four major collecting departments: Product Design and Decorative Arts; Wallcoverings; Textiles; and Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design. Contrast that with the traditional digitization approaches used at Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler, in which 45,000 museum objects were digitized over a fifteen-year period, from 2000 to 2015, and the success of digitization efforts at Cooper Hewitt is a game changer.
This new, comprehensive approach transforms a physical object (2D or 3D) from the shelf to a virtual object on the web in one continuous process, in the most efficient manner possible. Inefficiencies are attacked, reducing the turnaround time from the shelf to public access. For example, naming a file using a barcode scanner rather than typing an object name saves an average of fourteen seconds per file — that is a total of 103 working days over the course of the project!
Before the project commenced, very little of Cooper Hewitt’s collection of 210,000 objects had been available to or seen by the general public. Now, there are over 220,000 images online (multiple views of some objects increase the number), with more being added daily as the museum continues to photograph new acquisitions and significant holdings of sketchbooks and sample books. In the fourteen months following the museum’s reopening in 2014, some 347,000 users explored the collection in 486,000 sessions and averaged over four minutes per session. The users are as diverse as the objects — casual browsers, designers, curators, educators, students, and serious researchers — but for the first time in the history of the Smithsonian Institution, visitors can view almost the entire Cooper Hewitt collection without ever stepping into in the museum.
Mass digitization also fuels Cooper Hewitt’s in-gallery experiences and capabilities. Digital-table access to offsite objects creates collection transparency, and with that comes new visitor agency and engagement in ways only yet to be fully explored. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum — this list comprises a small portion of the art and design institutions around the world that are well on their way to digitizing their collections. Globally, natural history and science museum collections are also rapidly being digitized as institutions prioritize content and allot resources. Goals for museums to digitize collections include making content open, engaging digitally with audiences, using linked open data (meta data of object images in one museum can be connected with similar meta data in another museum), publishing online, and using technology to help advance conservation and conservation studies, among many others.
The mass digitization efforts at Smithsonian’s museums represent a real paradigm shift in institutional digitization, which has been characterized by “random acts of digitization,” or digitization when specific projects or circumstances warrant it. Mass digitization of entire collections allows for uses that sporadic digitization of collections cannot — specifically, the application of new analytical tools like visualization, network analysis, statistical analysis, and image analysis to collections. Many of these studies are taking place in the area of digital humanities, but increasingly the information is being used by interested and knowledgeable individuals who are mining collections for information that museums themselves would never have considered. When you capture entire collections via mass digitization, you can treat them as data sets, and that opens up a whole new way of “seeing” the collections.
The success of the DPO and Cooper Hewitt’s collaboration has directly led to an even more ambitious project: to complete the digitization of an additional eight Smithsonian museums in one concerted effort starting in late 2016. The participating museums are the Anacostia Community Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of African Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Smithsonian Gardens, and the Smithsonian Institution (Castle). A conservative estimate for completion of the additional museums is four years, but if the success at Cooper Hewitt is any indication, it’s likely that digitization will be complete in twenty-four to thirty months.
Matilda McQuaid is Deputy Curatorial Director and Head of Textiles at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Ken Rahaim is Senior Program Officer, Mass Digitization, Digitization Program Office at the Smithsonian Institution.
The mass digitization of the museum’s permanent collection is made possible by the Morton and Barbara Mandel Family Foundation.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2016 Design Journal, published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
