When it comes to digital art-book publishing, it would be easy for a print-oriented publisher to steal that old joke about the weather: everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it. But that ignores the great strides made by many, many museums and art-book publishers to stake a claim in the field, whether through apps, e-books, online catalogues, or a simpler repurposing of backlist content (he writes, pulling at his shirt collar). What print publishers are really complaining about is the lack of an established digital format as easy to understand to us as a book, and we have slumped away in disappointment when we realized that, darn it, we’d have to come up with it ourselves.

At the National Museum Publishing Seminar’s panel “Digitizing Your Publishing Practice,” I tried to provide a history of the Met’s Editorial (print) department’s dance with technology, both in terms of our print workflow and our increasing need to work with our Digital Media department. I focused less on just what the Met’s plans are because, well, I’m a process person, and, well, plans are what you create to get funding, processes are how you get the frickin’ thing done. My job is not to guess at future publishing technologies; I only do that for free in forums like this.

There was a lot of time spent, as detailed in jmohan’s excellent post, in a new argument between the precious-book-as-eternal-object versus content-as-viral-audience-driven-thing. Call it top-down curation versus bottom-up wall-tagging, or perhaps the question, “does information want to be free and is free information any good?” Those of us who know how much a really good exhibition catalogue bibliography costs to prepare have an idea of free-versus-not, but we’re not telling, or, at least, we haven’t been asked.

I wonder, however, if the journey itself will help provide the answer. If I’d had an hour to speak, and a closed ballroom door preventing the audience from leaving, I would have talked more about the feedback loop between content and existing institutional systems–while we all know what we’d like to publish, what we can publish has limitations like what our computer systems can handle, what our curators can pull together, and what can be disseminated to our audience. The roots of most legacy systems run deep and don’t let themselves get ripped out without a fight.

Every conference has its keyword: “curate” was all the rage at last year’s Digital Book World in New York, and I’ve heard “container” and “anecdata” passed around like candy at Tools of Change. While “voice” was supposed to be the theme of the NMPS, I think “preciousness” went more to the heart of the issues presented here. I hope technology may provide the answer to allowing us museums to create precious objects with some degree of ease AND make it accessible to the public AND maybe even get audience input to SOME part of the process, depending on what your institution can stomach. I’m sure some kid is out there in the modern equivalent of the tinkerer’s garage, creating an app or something which will allow institutions to make illustrated e-books as simply as people now tweet.

But that’s not the problem, or perhaps not the solution. The problem is the mindset that says precious OR mass, authority OR anarchy. (Perhaps “dichotomy” is the dark-horse candidate for keyword of the conference.) If we didn’t recognize there was an issue here, museums wouldn’t have social media staff, if not yet a social media plan, and they certainly wouldn’t be experimenting with different digital publishing platforms, if not developing a framework for studying the successes and failures. The Guggenheim museum’s experience with three versions of the Maurizio Cattelan exhibition catalogue was described in exquisite detail by Elizabeth Levy, and I’m sure many, many people in the audience were less jealous of the Guggenheim for its trailblazing than they were thankful that another museum tried it first and so gracefully acknowledged that one part of the triumvirate didn’t work out so well.

Seeing representatives of the Walker Art Center show up in panel after panel was impressive as much for what they’ve actually accomplished in branding and print-on-demand solutions as for the fact that they are, in fact, all over the place, in a good way. Comprehensive new-media endeavors don’t just grow themselves … wait, or do they? Whether it started top-down or bottom-up (dichotomy alert), the Walker’s presence shows that it is possible to establish an identity that engages the public without being any less of a museum.

All museums should take note that everything discussed at the Seminar is possible, just not always very well. I think, and certainly hope since it’s kinda my job, that the process of creating these digital publications will in some way BE the publication, in the same way that the internet created nouns-become-verbs like blog and tweet. What museums have to ensure is that whatever we create online must be precious not because we treat them as such but because the content makes them so. A few of our digital content creations may endure like great books, and many, many more will be instantly forgotten and deleted (like the vast majority of books would be if discarding and pulping them were as effortless as pressing a button, please don’t pretend otherwise), but if we keep our heads then we’ll no doubt catch up with what’s possible, until the next technology leaves us behind all over again.