THE COMMUNICATION OF ART

Like any reputable museum, the Art Institute of Chicago's collection is cataloged in a database. With a few keystrokes, a staffer can get information on any work of art currently or previously owned by the museum: date of acquisition, dimensions, medium — even a description of the artist's signature.

What that catalog won't show, however, is what the piece in question looks like. Electronic documentation of the Art Institute's collection of visual arts is anything but visual. And to a certain degree, you wouldn't expect it to be. Museums seem the least likely institutions to enter the broadband age.

But the Art Institute is taking its first big steps into the digital age by opening itself up digitally to the world. It wants to use broadband not only as an educational tool, but as a collaborative one, reaching out to patrons and the community of museums and cultural institutions it works with.

Alan Newman, head of the digital imaging department, is charged with creating an image database of the museum's collection. The work is slow going — the museum has 225,000 works of art in its collection, only a fraction of which is ever on display in the galleries. While about a third of the collection comprises architectural drawings, textiles pieces and artifacts that are used only for academic purposes and are rarely, if ever, displayed in the public galleries, Newman is left with the daunting task of digitizing the majority of the remaining work — more than 100,000 pieces. So far, his department has converted about 10,000 works and stored them in a repository of high-resolution photo files.

Newman's staff already has turned paint and canvas exhibits into substantial multimedia presentations accessible by schools. The museum has created a database of 1000 image files that textbook publishers can license via the Web. The Art Institute is even jumping into video streaming, attempting to take the museum's daily lectures and academic presentations to the online masses and use online videoconferencing as a collaborative tool among the Institute and other institutions' curatorial staffs.

“People who couldn't experience the Art Institute's collection now have a way of accessing it without stepping in the building,” he said.