By Akron Art Museum Staff The success of the Akron Art Museum’s project to put the permanent collection online over the next two years depends on many different aspects. We’ve spent a lot of time in these early days figuring out in what order to tackle all of these multiple sub-projects.

The Curatorial Department has been working with local photographers to document the pieces that still need high quality images, and that work has continued. We’ve also acquired all of the software that will be necessary for this project and, after careful research and consulting, we’re close to some exciting decisions about cutting-edge hardware to use as well.

Lately, we’ve been focusing on the design of the online database. It’s important for us to decide what data needs to be available to the public and how we want them to interact with the digitized art.  Once we know how we want the data to behave on our public interface, than we can make sure it’s acquired in the ideal way into our in-house database.

We’ve spent a lot of time examining other great online collections that our peers have created over the past few years, and coming up with new ideas of our own. Meetings with different departments in our museum as well as members of the public have given us a direction in design that we think will be most useful for our primary users.

After our meetings and brain-storming sessions, we’ve been taking our sketched-out ideas to our web designers and they’ve begun the task of making our visions for the online collection a reality. It has been a very interesting process and we’re excited to share the results with our virtual visitors in the near future!