Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Judy Keener of Bethel Park, right, and her niece Jennie Gibson, 8, visiting from Rochester, N.Y., look at the history of movie making exhibit, new to the Carnegie Science Center. Click photo for larger image. More on the story Program helps museums get up-close, interactive Museums using their Web sites to reach viewers

A revolution of sorts -- coupled with a measure of hand-wringing -- is happening at museums in Pittsburgh and around the country, as they struggle with their mission of retaining and educating visitors in an increasingly technological age.

Worried that they are losing visitors, especially young ones weaned on computer screens, museums are scrambling to be more than depositories of static artifacts behind glass. They are adding podcasted gallery talks, expanding their Web sites and experimenting with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, handheld computers and other gadgets in an attempt to keep visitors interested.

As often seems to be the case, Pittsburgh is behind the times -- at least on the surface. Pittsburgh's giant, the Carnegie Museum of Art, currently boasts few of those new wrinkles. But it will unveil a searchable online database of its collection early next year, and more offerings, including podcasts (recorded programs downloaded onto iPods and other digital media players) could follow.

Behind the scenes elsewhere in the city, tech-based innovations are already in place and helping museums do the same thing they have done for centuries -- getting people to consider ideas in thoughtful new ways.

The best of it starts, appropriately, at the place targeting the youngest crowd of all -- the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

Technically speaking ...

When the North Side museum went through its $28 million renovation recently, officials could have hedged their bets and packed the building with kid-friendly computer screens, but instead, they went in exactly the other direction. The Children's Museum uses techy twists on traditional exhibits (such as video-game-like joysticks to control puppets) and other pieces that use technology with subtlety.

At the "Text Rain" exhibit, seemingly random letters fall from the ceiling on a large screen. When visitors line up in front of the wall-sized screen, the letters fall on them to form lines of a poem. It's supposed to spark conversations among kids (and their parents) about the words, and wonder at how the exhibit works.

	John Beale, Post-Gazette Random letters fall from the ceiling on a large screen, forming lines of a poem at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh's "Text Rain" exhibit. The museum hopes the exhibit sparks conversations among children and parents about the words. Click photo for larger image.

Children "really spend way too much time in front of computer screens, and I think that's a very isolating experience," said museum director Jane Werner, the mother of two teenage boys.

"So we made the conscious decision to have a no-screens museum. We didn't want to ignore technology, but we didn't want to create those experiences that were one on one."

To study whether its exhibits are sparking visitor interaction, Children's analyzes them with the help of Pitt's "UPCLOSE" program -- the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments. UPCLOSE staffers, many of them Ph.D. students, study videos of exhibits and listen to conversations among museum-goers, gauging their reactions.

With the help of UPCLOSE, the museum develops exhibits, including tech-based ones, with the goal of getting people to talk about ideas and interact.

Pieces such as "Text Rain" are "a way to making technology accessible and involving of a whole group of people -- that's what we were looking for," Werner said.

Natural progression

Cool things are happening at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which uses computer video-conferencing to give live classes to children around the country.

Through its "Distance Learning" program, museum educators have taught more than 100 classes the past two years to kids as far away as Michigan and Texas. Educators talk about museum artifacts (such as animal skeletons or rock formations) live via a high-speed Web cam and take real-time questions from students hundreds of miles away.

The museum's embrace of the Web-based classes is awash in ironies: They have provided a rebirth for some of the museum's neglected, 1930s-era dioramas (of stuffed birds and the like), since the detailed displays look good on camera. Web camera close-ups, especially on tiny exhibits, also give students a closer look at the pieces, magnifying many times what would seem tiny in person.

"Some of the best teachers are recognizing that tech is changing education, that there's no reversing of that," said Patrick McShea, the museum's Distance Learning program officer. Those teachers are also seeing a change in students, he said.

"Several of the teachers have told us that students who were eager to ask questions [during the online forums] were students who normally didn't raise a hand and didn't ask questions."

Accessible art

Next door at the Carnegie Museum of Art there is not so much going on, tech-wise. Large museums from MoMA and the Smithsonian to smaller ones like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis offer visitors things like podcasts, cell phone gallery talks, video introductions to their collections and restoration projects, and blogs by museum staffers.

The Carnegie plans to get into the game early next year by putting about 10,000 objects (about a third of the museum collection, with more objects to be added later) onto a public, searchable database. Visitors will see pictures of the works, their sizes, their materials and so on. Wall text and audio clips will be available in some cases.

The online collection will join the interactive commentary on photos by Pittsburgh's Charles "Teenie" Harris, which is the other main interactive feature on the museum's Web site.

The new database (used in-house since early 2002) is meant to help museum visitors learn more about their favorite art and to aid academics with research, the museum's director of technology initiatives, Will Real, said. The museum is releasing the images without stamping them with watermarks, which is a calculated risk in a world of copyright worries.

"We're kind of walking a fine line between public service and giving access, and not giving away so much that people can take advantage of it. All the museums are facing that kind of dilemma," Real said.

Even the audio tours that the Carnegie, and most major museums worldwide, currently provide will be changing in coming years. Antenna Audio, a leading manufacturer of audio tour guides, is rolling out a new version like a handheld computer or PDA, which has a tiny computer screen providing photos and video, along with sound.

The new units from the Sausalito, Calif., company are pre-loaded with information -- later versions could get wireless updates or information from global positioning satellites. If they choose, viewers can see backup information and photos of art pieces on the PDAs and bookmark pieces that interest them. The unit will then e-mail the viewer a link with further information.

Antenna Audio's tour guides, taken from museums worldwide, are also going up for purchase on the Web, so art fans can review them before or after museum visits.

No tech for tech's sake

Many museum experts, including the researchers from UPCLOSE, worry that handheld computers will suck viewers in and away from the art itself. Chris Tellis, Antenna Audio's founder, said he is sensitive to those concerns.

"There are wonderful, wonderful benefits to new technologies, but people don't go to museums for gizmos. They go to museums to see wonderful art and have epiphanies," he said.

"If technology interferes in any way with that intimate relationship, there will be strong push-back on the part of the visitor. ... Fundamentally, the technology has to be about the art; it can't be about the technology."

Elisabeth Agro, an assistant curator at the Museum of Art, knows the dilemmas all too well. While she has led drives to add more technology to the Carnegie -- getting it to wire the Scaife Galleries for multimedia when they were renovated, for instance -- she is still convinced that, at their core, museums can be better off stripped of techy extras and proud of their roots as places of quiet spiritual reflection.

"I think what some of our younger audiences don't understand is, for us, the most important thing to convey to you is that the object is primary. You've come here because we have what the rest of the world does not have. We have the actual artifact," Agro said.

"That's what keeps us open and makes us special. Our job is to protect that object for you and the cultural heritage of hundreds of cultures around the world. ... You can go on the Web and see anything you want, and I encourage you to do that, but the bottom line is you come to us because we have the real artifact."