Smartphone apps could become regular part of museum tours

It’s now the age of the smartphone, and no one lets you forget it — not even the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met). Ranked one of the top 3 museums in the U.S. according to the 2014 TripAdvisor Traveler’s Choice Awards, the Met has just increased their popularity even further by releasing a new app for visitors.

Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer for the Met, believes the museum’s new app will be key to the elevating the experience of the average museum-goer. In an interview with The New York Times, Sreenivasan said that the app will really integrate the before, during and after together in every individual museum experience. Visitors are drawn into their journey right from the beginning: As soon as you open the app, you are fed with different images of featured exhibits. A significant strength of this app was that it also included highlights from certain collections by the staff, a feature that is sure to help the average visitor have a more meaningful museum experience.

However, for some, the function of the app during one’s visit to the museum still leaves much to be desired, since it does not provide additional information to the pieces on display or even a map for the gallery. The current version of the app is meant to lay a foundation for which a better version of it can be built, so this is an important aspect that the Met can look to as a potential improvement.

As with any item of technology nowadays, the aspect of social media is a very important component to the success of the app. Reviews and ratings are especially integral as they help the Met keep its app updated and relevant to the current market.

Bringing this back closer to home, the familiar Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) , only a stone’s throw away from Homewood campus, is also in the midst of putting their own mark on the constantly evolving world of apps. Nancy Proctor, the head of the Digital Experience and Communications division at the BMA, is at the helm of their new app, which launched just recently on Sept. 23. No stranger to this field, Proctor has also worked with the Smithsonian and the Met in various technology-related endeavors, including working with mobile apps, websites and event PDAs. (That’s personal digital assistants for those too young to remember.)

Released in conjunction with the BMA’s 100-day celebration of it’s centenary and the reopening of the American Wing and historic Merrick entrance, this app aims to encourage more interaction between the public and the museum as they move into a new era.

“In the app you’ll discover a different object from the BMA collection every day that is beloved by one of our curators, conservators or other experts,” Proctor said. Like the Met’s, the BMA app gives opportunities for its visitors to share their feedback with the museum by recording their thoughts or even taking selfies.

“We want to have a conversation with people in the BMA community so we can together build the best museum possible for Baltimore,” she said. 

With the abundance of portable tablets and phones with constant internet service, why do these museums even bother with creating an app that would contain similar information as what would be on a mobile website? According to Proctor, there are definitely certain things that can be done cheaply with websites and it is accessible to a wider range of devices. However, apps provide users with unique opportunities like recording audio, uploading selfies and utilizing location-based services that would allow the BMA to locate them in the museum and offer tailored information based on where they are.

For those who worry that this increase in technological usage might detract from the cultural and intricate experience of simply enjoying the artwork, Proctor believes that it all just really depends on the visitor itself.

“It is just as easy for an audio message in a mobile app to get you looking closely at a painting, for example, as it is for a video to glue your eyes to your phone,” she said.  However, if the video relays additional information that would add to a viewer’s knowledge of the art, then perhaps this technology could contribute to the overall experience. 

The introduction of apps can be still considered a relatively novel idea in the museum setting, so we will have to see if this combination of traditional and cyber art (in a sense) will truly improve on the classic museum experience.