“Online museum” or website?
Why the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research considers its new Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum an online museum per se.
A museum sans some sort of web presence is an exception these days. So what in the world is an online museum, and how does it differ from a brick-and-mortar museum’s web presence? Or any regular-old website for that matter?
I posed these questions to the 95-year-old YIVO Institute for Jewish Research about its new online museum, whose readiness to launch during a pandemic was “wild timing,” per a YIVO spokesperson.
“The online museum functions just like any other museum, except that its exhibitions all happen online as opposed to a physical gallery,” says Karolina Ziulkoski, chief curator, somewhat axiomatically.
Fair enough. But why did YIVO need a $3 million grant to do what virtually every other museum in the world does? Do adopt a page from the Passover haggadah: Why is this “online museum” different from all the other online museums?
To Ziulkoski, education is essential to YIVO’s mission, and the institute expects visitors to come away from its online “museum” with learning goals. The first exhibit which opened last August, “Beba Epstein: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Girl,” centers on the autobiography which a Jewish teenager, then a fifth-grader, wrote before World War II. Thought destroyed by the Nazis, the book and 170,000 other pages were found at Lithuania’s Martynas Mažvydas National Library in 2017.
YIVO hopes the exhibit, and others to follow, will reach new audiences with a different tone than an educational website would typically. To be accessible to both school-aged children and adults, the exhibit avoids educational jargon and uses animation, comics, maps, and three-dimensional components to help viewers learn through experience, to Ziulkoski.
“It’s about learning without realizing you’re doing so,” she says.
The online exhibition is impressive for its breadth of materials and for some of its layout and design. I learned quite a bit, but learning sans realizing you’re learning it isn’t. (Frankly, I doubt that occurs much in brick-and-mortar museums.)
Jonathan Brent, YIVO executive director and CEO, notes the institute can reach more people globally and domestically through an online museum. “It is also our objective to reach the non-Jewish world, because Jewish culture has played such a large role in shaping the modern world in Europe, Russia, and the Americas,” he says.
The documents and books YIVO translates for its exhibitions share their “riches with schools, institutions, community centers, churches, and synagogues alike throughout the world, and thereby help break down the stereotypes, cliches, falsehoods, and misconceptions that have for so long dominated both the way Jews understand themselves and the way they are understood by others,” he adds.
Is YIVO concerned that beefing up online offerings amid pandemic might wean the public off actual objects in person when it’s safe to visit with them again?
“There are always challenges and risks, but the benefits go way beyond reaching more people online,” Ziulkoski says. “We always think of the digital space as one completely different from in-person interactions. When you understand how people consume content and connect online, you can develop a strategy that makes the most of it without trying to mimic physical interactions.”
In a digital encounter with an artifact, you can’t understand scale and compare it easily to adjacent objects.
“Physical exhibitions also have limitations,” she says. “It is much harder to tell the complex historical context of many such artifacts in person: visitors are usually standing, or only have limited time available, or only visit once because of the price of tickets, so you cannot have a substantial amount of text or audio features.”
“Instead of focusing on what is being lost, we directed our attention to everything that can be done effectively online and what we gain from it,” she adds.
This reminds me of the difference between experiencing a ballgame in person (the smells, crowd’s roar, etc.) compared to at home (easy bathroom breaks, no ballpark-priced food, etc.). Each has advantages and drawbacks. But just as I wouldn’t say I’m digitally “at the game” when watching on television, I’m not sure I buy the idea yet of a digital museum being something rather special and different. (Writing in the New York Times, Joseph Berger may agree, having put “museum” in scare quotes.)
YIVO is doing a lot of important work with physical objects, including preserving its archive of 23 million documents and objects, and library of some 400,000 books. It’s digitizing many—several of which the Jewish Week highlighted last year. The Jewish Chronicle calls the new foray an “online interactive museum,” but I wonder why not just as soon call it an online history magazine?
I have no doubt YIVO will continue to educate many people through its website—whether one calls it a “museum”—but I think it’s likelier to keep changing hearts, minds, and lives with actual artifacts rather than heavily-illustrated essays. Hopefully it will be able to do both soon.
Perhaps as relative of an article as one could write on museums. Your conclusion seems to land where I found myself half way through--it's not either/or. I found the extended essays about A. Durer helpful as I approached many of his actual etchings, watercolors in the Albertina Austria. While the various paintings in London's National Gallery, Lisbon, Florence, and elsewhere inform and inspire, it was seeing the etchings in the context of various others that I enjoyed. And, I suppose, their scale. The latter was also the case in realizing firsthand the scale of Cranach's portraits in the Uffizi (or, the daunting size of Herod's tomb in the Israel Museum, or Pheidias's horse head from the Parthenon). I imagine the online educational assignments for students will only increase in years ahead in preparation for museum visits. An animated history of the tomb's discovery would be fascinating. To study the wide array of Durer's works before seeing the George Khuner Collection at the MET might introduce them to his family narrative as well, and the plight of his brother (I think in the coal mines while Durer went to art school first). An aspect not covered here is bringing to life the vast collections in storage. The scene of the warehouse boxes at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark is the image that lingers in the public, but the reality we all live with in the museum world is the small percentage of items that "see the light" so to speak. I recall being at the opening of the new exhibits several years ago in Jerusalem as the Israel Museum shifted to fewer objects in its exhibits to strengthen the central points. Likewise, places I've been like the crypt library at Monte Casino (replete with astonishing incunables) contain a wealth of items, not only remote from much of Italy, but visitors to that structure's last vestige of the pre-Nazi occupation. We can also applaud digitization efforts like those of Scot McKendrick at the British Library, the Sackler Library staff in Oxford and the Beinecke staff (and Jonathan Edwards Center) at Yale.