The document summarizes the Cleveland Museum of Art's journey towards digitization of its collection and use of digital technologies. It describes how the museum renovated galleries, digitized over 90% of its collection, and developed digital tools like the ArtLens app and ArtLens Gallery interactive space. Evaluation found those who used ArtLens technologies spent more time and engaged with more artworks. The museum now uses analytics to understand visitor flows and has launched an open API to make its collection publicly available for various uses.

1. Play with Data
Open GLAM Now
November 20, 2019
Creating Wonder Through
Digitization
Cleveland Museum of Art
https://www.raa.se/in-english/events-seminars-and-cultural-experiences/open-digital-heritage/

2. Jane Alexander
Chief Digital Information Officer,
The Cleveland Museum of Art
@janecalexander

3. “The Cleveland Museum of Art
creates transformative experiences
through art, ‘for the benefit of all the
people forever’”
CMA Mission
Bringing our mission into the digital age...

4. “We are Deeply Committed to the Use of
Technology as an Interpretive Tool”
— William Griswold, Director of the Cleveland
Museum of Art, MW Tour April 2017
Director Support!

5. Are they uncomfortable?

6. Technology and the Art Museum, MET 1967

7. Cataloguing at CMA 2010…

8. The road to digitization
Renovation
• Galleries closed on rotation
~ 7 years
• Collection deinstalled –
storage
• Opportunity for digitization
• Idea for a new space
• Re-engineer back-end
system
Now
• 90% digitized
• 100% by Fall 2020

9. Original Gallery One 2012

10. ArtLens Wall is a 40-foot
interactive, multitouch, MicroTile
wall that displays all objects in the
museum’s collection
ArtLens Wall

11. ArtLens App
• Interactive map
• Docks to interactives
• Museum guided tours
• Data on every object on view
• Available on ipad, iphone,
Android
• Content updates every 15
minutes

13. FLEXIBLE AND FULLY–INTEGRATED

14. Gallery One  ARTLENS Gallery

15. “Effective iterative design requires constant
analysis, continued learning and all the
while improving without re-inventing.”
— Jane Alexander, Chief Digital Information Officer,
The Cleveland Museum of Art (2018)

17. STANDARDIZED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
UPDATES EVERY 15 MINUTES
ONE SOURCE OF TRUTH

18. Gaze
Tracker

19. Machine Learning and Facial Recognition

20. ArtLens Beacon
Visitors See Results

21. What do educators and
curators need to create
evolving digital spaces?
ArtLens Exhibition

22. Over 1,000 frames
of 4K photography
Show More

23. Relate Physical to Digital

24. CMA ARTLENS Exhibition
Cleveland, OH
Play with Scale

25. (The Old Label)

26. Author ‘New Labels’

27. 2019: From 360s to
Photogrammetry

28. Scan Artworks:
even 3D Artworks!
Updated ArtLens App

29. ARTLENS Gallery:
Is it working?

30. t
ANALYTICS
We've been collecting from the beginning
COLLECT
SHARE
ANALYZE
(well, best we could)

31. In 2018, the CMA’s
Research and Evaluation
team and Rockman
concluded a two-year project
to examine new ways of
measuring the impact of
digital interactives in art
museums. They used
ARTLENS Gallery as a Case
Study
Bolander, E.,Ridenour, H.,Quimby, C. 2019. Art Museums and Technology: Developing
New Metrics to Measure Visitor Engagement. Project funding was generously provided by
the National Endowment for the Arts ArtWorks program.

32. Findings from Evaluation 2019
Bolander, E.,Ridenour, H.,Quimby, C. 2019. Art Museums and Technology: Developing New Metrics to Measure Visitor Engagement. Project funding was generously
provided by the National Endowment for the Arts ArtWorks program.
36% of the participants
spent time in ARTLENS
Gallery
People who visited
ARTLENS Gallery
demonstrated greater
gains in self-reported level
of art understanding and
knowledge

33. Where Are People Going?
How Long Are They Staying There?
Where Do They Go Next?
What Are They Learning?
We Still Want To Know:

34. Analyzing Visitor Experience with
Meraki Wireless Access Points
Meraki allows us to collect data from any wireless antenna hitting
our wifi access points, whether they’ve logged onto our wireless
network or not.

35. YES, we have “Big Data”
• 105 wireless access points
• 1-2 million rows of data per day
• 0.4 GB per day just for search indexes
• A system of 8 separate cloud services
(plus Tableau) to process it all

36. But there were some challenges
• Noisy data
• Translating devices to visitors
• Building trust
• Facilitating adoption

37. t
Using a data scientist to interpret this data
1
2
3
4
5
The visitor
most likely
traveled this
way

38. t

39. t

40. t
• Visitors who DID
NOT visit ARTLENS
(177k)
• Spent 2.2 hours on
average in museum
These visitors go to few
spaces overall

41. t
• Visitors who DID
visit ARTLENS (82K)
• Spent 12 minutes longer
at the museum
These visitors
interact with
almost 4 times
the number of
spaces!

42. t
• Visitors who spent >5
min in ARTLENS (37k)
• Spent 36 minutes more at the
museum!
These visitors
interact with
more spaces, for
even longer
periods of time
They’re likely
spending more
money at the café!

43. t
...visitors who spend at least 5 minutes in
ARTLENS Gallery are spending
approximately 35 minutes longer in the
museum compared to those who do not
visit ARTLENS Gallery.

44. t
And now we can ask questions like this
... Does the selection of artworks in
ARTLENS impact gallery visits?

45. t
4
5

46. t
We’re connecting ARTLENS
games with gallery visits…
WOW!
4
6

47. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• “Companies need your consent
to collect your data”
• What constitutes “personal data”?
• How does this affect museums?
• All personal data is encrypted

48. Open Access
• Back-end changes allow us to be more
flexible and implement innovative projects
more easily.
• For example, our new API – allowed us to
implement Open Access…

50. Through this initiative, the
CMA’s collection is a part of the
lives of our users for the
broadest possibilities of artistic
creation, business innovation,
education, and scholarly
practice.

51. t
Launched with:
• API
• GitHub Repository
• Azure Search
• New Collection
Online
• Descriptive text

52. t
Partnerships

53. Metadata Available to Public
Accession number Creator role Related work
Artist biography Credit line Related work location
Catalogue raisonne Culture Related work type
Citations Current location State of the work
Copyright Department Subject matter description
Creation date Digital didactic** Support material
Creation date earliest Edition of the work Technique
Creation date latest Fun fact Title
Creator description Inscriptions Title in original language
Creator extent Inscription translations Type
Creator name in original language Measurements Watermarks
Creator qualifier Provenance Exhibition History

55. Since Launch

56. t

57. Powerful, flexible smart-search

59. Many metadata fields available to scholars

60. Clear explanation of CC0 on every page

61. Department
Bots
Created by the
public
Tweet
randomly
selected
artworks every
day using API
data

62. Artwork in Games
Coding classes finding fun imagery from CMA’s collection

63. Another Game:
“cuttlefish in
the museum”

64. High Fashion
Dolce & Gabbana June 2019
CMA's Cupid and Psyche, Jaques-Louis David, 1817 (1962.37)

65. Data
Visualization
Hackathon
participants
found
predominant
colors
Engagement
with CMA's
API

66. Analytics – Wikimedia vs. cma.org
Artwork Views, 4 Months (May-Aug)
en.wikipedia.org:
www.clevelandart.org:
224,872
2,503,195

67. Top 10 Artworks on Collection Online

68. Top 10 CMA Artworks on Wikipedia

69. Artwork by Department
Decorative Art and Design

70. Artwork by Department
Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art

71. The (CMA) team has come to embrace digital
as in perpetual beta, constantly reinventing
itself, continually pushing the boundaries of
what’s technically and humanly possible in a
museum. This is a place of exciting
discomfort and possibility. We don’t yet know
what kind of innovation the future will bring
but we will strive to meet everyone’s needs,
For the Benefit of All the People, Forever.”
— Jane C. Alexander, Chief Digital Information
Officer, The Cleveland Museum of Art
“

72. What’s Next?
CMA director
William Griswold

73. Thank You
Jane Alexander, Chief Digital Information Officer
The Cleveland Museum of Art
@janecalexander