Brooklyn Museum Launches New Smart Phone Tours on artmuseumjournal.com

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Brooklyn Museum (exterior). Photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

Brooklyn Museum Launches New Smart Phone Tours
By STAN PARCHIN
August 24, 2009

Visitors to the Brooklyn Museum with mobile phones that have Internet access will be able to produce their own gallery guides to the permanent collection beginning August 26, 2009.

Individuals with Web-enabled phones make their initial selections of art. The museum's program then suggests related works to see. Visitors can then create sets of annotated objects and share their customized tours with others on the museum's Web site, which contains images and brief descriptions of more than 11,000 artworks.

For example, a visitor studying ancient Egyptian art of the New Kingdom period (ca. 1550-1070 B.C.) might select the Brooklyn Museum's gilded wood statue of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (ca. 1390-1352). Given the interest in this ruler, the program might then recommend that the visitor look at the Wilbour Plaque (ca. 1352-1336 B.C.), a limestone sculptor's model of the pharaoh's son and daughter-in-law, Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

The new customized guide is free to all visitors. It is designed as a mobile Web application, specifically engineered for the small screen. The information displayed on the mobile device is taken from the museum's online collection and visitors' reflections (which become part of a recommendation system on the museum's Web site).

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