京都 リンネ マリサ(Melissa M. Rinne)さん
京都 リンネ マリサ(Melissa M. Rinne)さん
- １. テーマ
- 将来の博物館の役割
- ２. 内容
Museums have traditionally been quiet, passive, and often closed institutions. Certainly, museums regularly organize exhibitions, publish catalogs and guides, and offer lectures and tours. In general, however, the public*s knowledge of museums and their works has been limited to what each museum chooses to provide at a certain period of time.
For example, if you want to see a particular work, a Chinese porcelain vase for example, owned by a particular museum, the Kyoto National Museum for example, you have to wait until that vase is put on exhibit. Then you have to come to Japan, to Kyoto, to the corner of Higashiyama and Shichijo Streets during exhibit period and when the museum is open in order to see your vase.
When the vase is not on exhibit, you have to rely on photographs in books. However, the cost of large art books limits the number of people and libraries that are willing to purchase them, and you may end up spending a good deal of time and/or money.
Even if you find a book with your vase included, the number of detailed photographs is inevitably limited. For example, a book might include front and back views of the vase, but what if you want to see the underside, or inside of the vase, or a close-up of the motifs? If you wanted to read about the vase, you had to spend a great deal of time searching through the stacks and periodicals section of a large library, if you happened to have such a library in the vicinity. But the information on your vase may only be in Chinese, or Japanese, and the library you visit may have only limited materials..
If you happen to have the proper qualifications, you may be permitted to see the vase in person. But even then, you have to make an appointment with a curator and come to the museum at his or her convenience, and the amount of time that you might see the vase was limited.
The key similarity among the above scenarios is limitation. Geographical limitations, schedule limitations, financial limitations, time limitations, language limitations, qualification limitations , etc. affect every step of your efforts to access more information about the vase. This traditional way of visiting museums and researching art works will probably never change and logistical difficulties will always inhibit the freedom of our research. But with increased use of computer networks, such as the Internet, and multimedia resources, life just might get a little easier.
How can multimedia and the computer networks improve the old fashioned way of doing museum business? First of all, computer networks can make available tremendous amounts of text, graphic, sound, and moving picture information. Thus you can not only see images, but also have quick access to related text and sound and moving picture information. This information is available twenty-four hours a day, around the world. This means that you can access information from your home or office and at your convenience(not on the schedule of the museum). Networks can be made non-discriminatory, meaning that you no longer need to have pecial qualifications to access information, and this information can reach more people and more types of people than ever before possible. Computer networks are easy to edit and upgrade, but they can also be cumulative. Thus you may be able to see not only information and images from current exhibitions, but also a large archive of information pertaining to past exhibitions. Well-designed computer networks and databases are searchable and interactive. This means that you can find and get the information you need quickly and conveniently. Having access to a computer network is like having an entire library at your fingertips.
Let us rethink your attempts to see the Chinese vase again with the addition of multimedia and computer networks. To see the Chinese vase in person, you will still have to come to the Kyoto National Museum. But even from your home in, say, Guatemala, you turn on your computer and access the Kyoto National Museum*s homepage. Ideally, the homepage would be translated into many languages, but lets assume that the Kyoto National Museum*s homepage is offered only in Japanese and English, as it is today. No problem, you have an translating function on your browser so that the English text automatically translates into Spanish. You enter a search for your vase and come up not only with images of the vase, but linked references to related on-line readings, ranging from light articles to extensive academic papers. When you open the images of your vase, you find that they rotate three-dimensionally, zooming in or out at your command, so that you can see any part of the vase in as much detail as you desire. Finally, if you still want to see the work in person, you can use e-mail to make an appointment with a museum curator.
Naturally, the Kyoto National Museum, like other museums, is far from achieving the idealdescribed above. There are multiple limitations to overcome before we use multimedia and networks to their full potential. Museums must make a commitment to actively provide various kinds of information on a continuing basis. This means that museums will need to invest great amount of time, energy and funds to develop and maintain databases to support the environment described above. The museum staff must be increased to include people with technical,language, and system management skills. Museum curators and researchers as well as the general public will need to refine their computer skills. At the same time, computer technicians will need to refine their analytic, writing and design skills. Not only museums, but society in general still faces various limitations to true freedom of information. Access to computer networks among the general public still tends to be limited to people of a certain financial and educational level. The Internet itself is still in the "dinosaur stages," so that exchanges of large amounts of information are slow and tedious. The Information Age will not arrive overnight, but the technical advances necessary to support a more ideal environment may be available sooner than we expect.
Though computer graphics can probably never supersede the experience of seeing works of art in person, multimedia to computer networks have the potential to broaden and deepen the relationships to museums for more people than ever before. In the Information Age, museums may even become energetic, active and open institutions. And hopefully they will even make our lives a little easier.
みなさんからの提案をお待ちしています。
提案のページへ
前のページへ戻る