On Jun 19, 1996 14:09:01, 'Helen Glazer <[log in to unmask]>' wrote:


>Maybe that would work.  But let me play devil's advocate here.  Evidently
a
>lot of visitor research suggests
>that many people pick up booklets (even free ones) only as souvenirs and
>read them at home later.

I should have mentioned that the Picasso Portrait exhibit label text was
certainly interesting and well conceived -- one of the most informative
sets of labels I've seen anywhere, the task made easier, perhaps, by their
biographical content and by the lack of any necessity to treat the images
in stylistic terms that did not relate to biography.  All the more
frustrating was it, therefore, to be forced to compete for an unobstructed
view of these texts.  After about the third or fourth room in, I'd have
gladly paid a few dollars for a booklet with all the exhibit label copy.
Let's say they charged $5 for a simple booklet and refunded $4 when it was
returned.  Returned copies could be recycled, while those who wanted to
keep the booklet could certainly do that.  It would be important to design
such a booklet strictly as a gallery guide.  The designers should not turn
it into a short catalogue with illustrations.  Here, the fewer pictures the
better.

It is possible that the wall copy was lowered for people in wheelchairs,
but, as I see it (or didn't see it), the people who had the most difficulty
reading the labels were those polite viewers who didn't muscle their way
into the front.

Exhibits such as these are true ephemera.  In a few years time the exhibit
will be just memory, the labels and other didactic materials all gone.
What's left is a catalogue which, I suppose will be filled with full
scholarly entries, general discussions, relatively poor reproductions with
some good ones.  But the catalogue does not, cannot substitute for the
exhibit which is essentially lost.

I can't think of a better excuse than the above to make us want to preserve
such exhibits on CD-ROM, especially these once-in-a-lifetime (if not
in-an-eternity) extravaganzas.  With current technology the very format of
the exhibit, the gallery design, the arrangement of the rooms, the way
curators hung pictures to make non-verbal associations and comparisons, can
all be preserved.   Add to this the label text and its associated images,
the catalogue, unexhibited comparative materials, the audio tours, press
releases, reviews, and other related materials, and the entire exhibit (a
virtual exhibit) in a simulacrum can be preserved for the future.  So much
work of the exhibit designers and curators disappears when the exhibit is
taken down and dispersed; here is a way to record it as an event, fixed for
posterity.  I can imagine such a publication providing set-up automated
tours aimed at different kinds of viewers.  Such virtual tours might walk
us through the rooms, allowing us to stop by any picture so that we can
read the wall text, or jump from wall text to the catalogue, to a
bibliography, to a comparison, to an image credit, and then back to the
tour or someplace else.   And, of course, such a CD-ROM will certainly
allow those of us who are back-of-the-crowd jumping label readers finally
to have our day.
--

Robert A. Baron
Museum Computer Consultant
P.O. Box 93, Larchmont N.Y. 10538
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