Activating Smithsonian Open Access
As Open Access to our collections grows, so does the creativity and ingenuity of our audience.
In February 2020, when the Smithsonian launched our Open Access initiative, we made 175 years of science, art, history, culture, technology, and design available for anyone, for any purpose, for free. Audiences would be limited only by what they could imagine.
20 months later, the Activating Smithsonian Open Access (ASOA) project from Cooper Hewitt has surpassed my highest expectations of what our audiences could imagine. I am awed by the ingenuity and the inventiveness of what this program produced.
Earlier this year, Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab announced an open call for proposals that promised creative, unexpected, and collaborative ways to engage with Smithsonian Open Access collections. Out of 102 proposals, seven teams were selected to receive funding to develop prototypes for public use. Each of these prototypes offers a glimpse into what the future of museums might look like.
Art Echo, a web-based virtual reality experience, allows audiences to explore the acoustic properties of 3D objects in the Open Access collections, using images, sound, and simulated echolocation to create a robust museum-going experience. Art Clock tracks daily life to the minute by displaying a uniquely appropriate image from the collections, crowd-sourced by users on the web with the support of artificial intelligence. ScienceVR Treasure Hunt, an educational multiplayer video game, asks users to discover, authenticate and collect Open Access artifacts, scoring points and learning from each other along the way.
As we move forward from the pandemic, one of my highest priorities as Secretary is to create a truly virtual Smithsonian. A nimble, digitally fluent, data-savvy organization. An institution that embraces the power of technology not only to reach new audiences, but to expand the possibilities for how those audiences interact with the Smithsonian and with each other. Activating Smithsonian Open Access helps show what this path forward might look like.
The Smithsonian Open Access collections have grown to over 3.3 million 2D and 3D digital items. In the past three months alone, these assets have been viewed over 25 million times and downloaded nearly 800,000 times. It is my hope that future use of the Open Access collections will be as unexpected and thrilling as what we have seen with ASOA. This is a journey of discovery for the Smithsonian as well as for our audiences, but that is the beauty of it. We cannot predict the ways Open Access users might remix, redesign, and repurpose our collections, but the new ways of learning they unlock will be fascinating to see unfold.
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Posted: 27 October 2021
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Categories:
Art and Design , Collaboration , Cooper Hewitt Museum , From the Secretary
