Wednesday, April 01, 2009

The Museum of Modern Art Enhances Its Web Site - NYTimes.com

The Museum of Modern Art Enhances Its Web Site - NYTimes.com

The 30-second Video on this page is priceless.

In many ways MoMA, which has never had an ongoing blog, is catching up to a museum world that has been finding many ways to attract and share information with art lovers who may never set foot in the museums. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, which has maintained lively blogs since the summer of 2006, provides a detailed stream of traveloguelike pictures and words to keep viewers current on the progress of its archaeological work in Egypt (brooklynmuseum.org).

For the last two years MoMA has been branching out energetically elsewhere on the Web, creating a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed (something the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many other museums also maintain) and a Flickr group, where museum visitors can upload their pictures, some of which will end up on the museum’s Web pages. The new site includes an area called MoMA Voices that Ms. Burnette and Steven Peltzman, the museum’s chief information officer, see as a place where blogs will begin to form and where new ideas about how to have conversations will grow organically.

Museum visitors with cellphones will be able to text the number associated with an artwork to an area on the museum’s Web site. In this way they can later review and organize what they have seen. Mr. Peltzman and Ms. Burnette said that they hoped one day to allow site visitors to search for works on display simply by zooming in on three-dimensional maps.