Richard Benefield, Deputy Director, Harvard Art Museums

The art museums have the eighth largest art collection in the United States. It's by far the largest academic art museum, and we've had a long history of training the curators and the directors of the great institution in the world. Our primary mission is teaching and research, and not that of a public art museum. But being different from a library, having primary source materials rather than secondary source materials - that is having the only one of its kind anywhere - it really behooves us to try to disseminate as much information about the collections as we can whether it's in printed publications or in digital publications like our collections online.

People are using collections online to do basic research, which leads them to online conversations through email or maybe even a visit to the art museum"s to look at the work. Faculty, students, our own internal staff, museum professionals at other Harvard museums - they're already making use of collections online for a variety of reasons - whether they're just looking for a picture to illustrate the essay that they're writing for the next exhibition catalogue or whether a professor is looking for an object to illustrate a point, because they want to come into the art museums and actually use the real object in teaching the class, but it helps them to find out that we have the object, where its located, how to come up with more information about it, which curator to go to - to address that - because we have embedded contact information for each type or class of object for which one of our curators to go to and work with.

Outside the university the people that we know about who are using collections onine for the most part are other museum professionals. People who we're working with to co-organize exhibitions because we actually do that quite a bit here where there may be three or four different institutions working to organize the same exhibition and they're scattered all over the country or in fact all over the world. So it's a real short cut for us to just be able to say, go on the web and you can find the picture and the basic information of this object here. And ultimately we hope to be able to make [available] the depth of information that is available in our database because what we make available online is just the tip of the iceberg of what we actually have in the systems, and then of course we have files and files on every object - it would be a password-protected situation where they would be able to get deeper into the information than just what we make available in general to the public online.

When we went live we went live, with just under 60,000 records. We had 10,000 digital images already when we went live, and we are constantly adding to that on an almost weekly basis. And as we work with the DRS - the Digital Repository Service at the Harvard university library which is where we store all of our images - we're working to make the whole process of getting that upload more seamless, and in fact were working towards live so that the minute the information is put into the system, which is based here, that it's available to the whole world.

The most logical person for us to begin to reach out to - and we've already begun these discussion- is with the Peabody museum. We work with them more than just about any other museum or library entity at the university in sharing our objects and exhibitions, and it would be great it we could share the infrastructure for the collections management system as well. We currently use the same collections management system. I think we've been a little more aggressive in pursuing the updates to the system, but we're both very much aware that the system has its limitations and its time for us to take the next step to the new system so hopefully we will be able to work with them. The way different departments and various entities, centers, and departments have been grouped together at the university sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense. Its a historical process - that when you get to the next stage of things you take a look back and you go, OK, well, maybe it makes more sense to think about this being regrouped in another way.