Conclusion

This project asked the question: How are digital components embedded in a cultural institution as large as the Met? And how does that affect the visitor and research experience inside and outside the museum building?

Parts of this question were answered throughout the three sections: The Mediated Experience, Beyond the Museum, and Data at the Met.

The Mediated Experience explores where technology is embedded into the physical experience at the Met. It finds that in some cases there is seamless integration and in some cases there isn’t. In temporary exhibitions and more recently updated exhibitions, the Met is experimenting with experience enhancing technologies like AR and with placing QR codes throughout the physical space. But there are large sections of the museum where there is no indicated digital content and even the additional content that can be accessed is outdated and barely usable. However, there are clearly changes happening at the Met – they seem to have an agenda towards digital integration. For this to be successful they need to make more of an effort to make those digital materials accessible in the physical museum space.

Beyond the Museum explored what content is available for an exclusively digital expereince at the Met. This section concluded that the digital exhibition experience that the Met offers is multifaceted and rich with educational material for students all around the world shared between their website and their Google Arts & Culture page. These digital materials, however, are unevenly distributed amongst the exhibitions on view. If one is simply exploring they are sure to find a large amount of information, but with a targeted search the results are unreliable and vary significantly depending on the exhibition. The museum is making an effort to accurately tag and connect different items, exhibitions, articles, podcasts, videos and other educational material; though it's not always clear that this information is even available to search for.

Data at the Met looks into the Met’s Open Access Program and the way it has stretched beyond only the museum’s website. The API has been utilized by students to render visualizations of items in the collection and computer scientists have even developed AI to automatically tag works of art with keywords. All of this makes it possible for the public to more effectively search the collection and lets it serve as a better educational and inspirational tool. This section also illuminates that there is still a lot of room for improvement in regards to the search tool. Without prior art history knowledge of key words and eras it is difficult to search things within the collection. And even when proper keywords are used it still doesn’t always produce accurate results.

Overall it seems like the Met is headed in the right direction, but when it comes to digital content they must expand their ideas of both how their content can be used and by whom. Because what is the point of having so much information available if people don’t know it exists or how to access it?