Agile Thinking / Agile Publishing: Harvard Art Museums
June 14, 2012 in Digital Strategy by Greg Albers
Currently on view at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum is the exhibition Jasper Johns / In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print (May 22—August 18, 2012). The show grew out of an art history course taught by Jennifer Roberts. As she describes it:
The course, initially proposed by the Harvard Art Museums as a way to experiment with new forms of curricular collaboration in advance of the opening of its renovated building, was intended to give undergraduates the opportunity to design and mount an exhibition centering on objects in our collections. Four juniors enrolled in the class: Jacob Cedarbaum, C. Andrew Krantz, Mary Potter, and Phillip Y. Zhang. Their work in conceptualizing and planning the exhibition was so outstanding that the Art Museums decided to develop and promote a much larger and more ambitious exhibition than had originally been envisioned …
This alone is a story worth noting. It is a wonderful example of a meaningful collaboration and engagement between a museum and some of its primary constituents. It is also a wonderful example of what I would call “agile thinking”. With little fear of failure, they tried something simple and relatively low-risk (a course with a few students, focused on a single work, with the idea of mounting a small exhibition at the end) and when they saw it was working, they expanded it. Smart. Agile.
Here’s my favorite part: Along with the exhibition and its traditional catalogue, Harvard Art Museums also created a digital publication of “Companion Essays” written by the four student curators, and released it for free download on the exhibition site. Awesome. It’s fully illustrated, edited, and beautifully and professionally designed (at the level of the print catalogue I’m imagining). It’s a cheap and reasonably simple way of getting more exhibition information out in a meaningful and frictionless way. Or what I’d call “agile publishing”.
I first discovered the project from a tweet by Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee:
I am enjoying student essays in online catalog accompanying @harvartmuseums Jasper Johns show hvrd.me/KKFtcW —Sebastian Smee (@SebastianSmee) June 4, 2012
Smee went on with a half dozen more tweets quoting the “Companion Essays”, but he didn’t once, notably, mention the traditional print catalogue. Museums looking at projects like this, and especially those with an interest in social media, would be well-served to ask why this is. Is it because the essays in the print catalogue aren’t any good? Probably not. Is it because Smee didn’t know the print catalogue existed? Unlikely. Or, is it at least in part because the free, instant digital download, from wherever he was at the time (in his office, on the train, sipping a cocktail on his back porch) gave him immediate and easy access to the information he was interested in, when he was interested in it?
So, where can Harvard Art Museums and others looking into agile publishing projects like this go from here? I’d suggest a couple next steps, based on Harvard’s project specifically, but applicable to everyone.
IDEA 1:
The division between the printed catalog and the digital essays is arbitrary. Print both! Look at print-on-demand (POD) if you’re nervous about spending extra money with Hatje Cantz Verlag on a second or expanded book, or if time is a factor. Also, digitize both! You cleared rights and digitally published 88-pages of essays, you can do the same for 96-pages of catalogue. You can even charge money for it, though you’ll have to give some thought to the difference between a 96-page book for $45 and an 88-page one for $0, and you would want to maintain a free download option, at least for an extended excerpt, or better yet, the complete main essay.
IDEA 2:
A PDF is not (by itself at least) a digital publication. A digital publication should be formatted and optimized for reading on digital devices. While a PDF is easy to create and can be read on a variety of devices, except in a few cases it’s not close to an ideal digital reading experience, especially when it has obviously been formatted after a print book. Digital publishing = PDF + EPUB + MOBI/Kindle formats. These three together will give your readers a truly native, digital reading experience on any device they own (Kindle, Nook, iPad …) and it’s well worth the effort to make it happen.
Of course, both these ideas are simply about giving readers access to the material in as many formats as possible, or what I’d call ”agile reading”.
[...] Arthur M. Sackler Museum publishes free companion ebook alongside printed catalogue for the exhibition Jasper Johns / In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of [...]
[...] wish more art museums did this with exhibition [...]
I suspect many, if not most, major art museums have explored this idea. There are some snarly issues with copyright for much of the art of the present and last century that must be negotiated with artists and agencies like ARS, and for many institutions the printed versions need to pay at least their production costs. Offering a free online version undercuts their sales prospects. On Demand printing is an option but many productin costs (i.e. design, photography, rights, etc.) remain prohibitive, to say nothing of quality control.
Thanks so much for you comment Chris, you bring up a number of great points. First, you’re completely right about copyright, though in this case, Harvard presumably already went to the trouble of clearing rights for both the images in the print catalogue and for the different images in the digital one. Had they wanted to, image rights for both print and digital use could have been cleared simultaneously with little extra effort. Second, regarding print-on-demand, I’m actually working on a full post about that for next week, so I’ll hold off on addressing it here.
Most importantly, I wanted to address this provocative and important statement, which probably deserves multiple posts of its own: “Offering a free online version undercuts [print versions] sales prospects.” I’d reply that publishing is not zero-sum game. There are different customers for each format and price point, including new customers to be had with e-book editions. Currently, there are people willing to pay $50, $60, $70 and up for a hardcover catalogue of the new exhibition, and there are many who are not. Many museums offer those who are not a $20 or $30 paperback option, but what if that’s still too much? A museum visitor who buys no book at all does nothing for the museum publisher’s bottom line, nor, critically, is the museum doing anything for that visitor (or for the authors and artists featured in the books for that matter). Why not offer visitors a $10 electronic version? Yes, some print buyers might switch to the cheaper e-book version, but I’d be willing to bet (and I think other publishers are finding this already) that the loss in revenue there would be evened by the e-book sales from the many NEW readers purchasing the e-book who never bought anything before. Same overall revenue, more overall readers. Taking this a step further then, if the $10 electronic is too expensive why not also offer a free sample with just an essay or two? Or some publishers even offer totally free online-only versions, and have found readers are willing to pay for the convenience of reading and annotating their own copies, be they digital or print. I’d also go a step farther the other way, and suggest creating a limited-edition deluxe edition for $150 or more. Publishing art books should be like dealing drugs, get ‘em hooked on some freebies and schwag, and then move them up to the good stuff.
You should check out the DMA’s new George Grosz catalogue – available as an ipad app, but also as print on demand via blurb. And both are free!
http://www.dm-art.org/View/CurrentExhibitions/dma_410984
You should check out the DMA’s new George Grosz catalogue. It is available as an ipad app (free) or as print on demand via blurb (for costs of production).
http://www.dm-art.org/View/CurrentExhibitions/dma_410984
Tamara, yes! Thanks for pointing this one out to our readers. I love (of course) that there are print and digital options, and that the app is free and the book is as “free” as it can be. Though even when selling at cost and the book is still $60, that’s certainly a challenge, and a good point to make about the disadvantage of POD. I’d be interested in hearing sales/download figures for the two formats after the show’s closed. Maybe you’d even be willing to write a post for the blog here? I’d also be curious to hear if there are/were any other formats considered—Web, PDF, EPUB—that would give folks other options for accessing the catalogue? Thanks again for sharing it!
Of course! And, yes we’re looking at making available in other formats, it just takes some time. It’s our first epub so we’re experimenting with as many ways to deliver the content as we can. Stay posted!
[...] wish more art museums did this with exhibition [...]
[...] it. Can’t annotate it. Can’t share a snippet of it, or even copy a section for your own notes. I’ve written before in defense of what I call ”agile reading”, and I’m afraid this is anything but. In these [...]