Web and mobile

Rebecca Atkinson finds out how a well-stocked app is shaping visitors’ experiences at the Cleveland Museum of Art

ArtLens was launched as an iPad app last year, but now the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio has reissued it for iPhone users. The app, which is free to download, allows people to create personal tours of the museum’s collections or to follow museum and visitor-created tours.

ArtLens is only 25.8mb but it does contain 12,492 images – which means it can take ten minutes to load the first time it is opened. Anyone unprepared to wait can hire an iPad for $5 from the museum.

The app uses GPS wayfinding to allow users to discover featured artworks as they wander round, and image recognition to offer additional interpretation.

There are the usual tools for saving and sharing artworks through social media, live information about events and exhibitions, and video and audio from curators. There’s also a search tool and a top-ten list of visitors’ favourite artworks.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has previously explored the possibilities of using technology to open up its collections through the 40-foot Collection Wall in Gallery One – this multi-touch microtile screen displays images of more than 3,500 objects from the museum’s collection and uses recommendation logic to allow people to shape tours and discover the collections that are on display.

ArtLens taps into this technology, so users can discover more of the museum’s artworks based on collection, time period or material.


The Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds has launched a blog dedicated to its work to accompany its forthcoming exhibition, Recovery? From Flanders to Afghanistan, which opens in July.

The project has been funded by Arts Council England and the Thackray Medical Research Trust, and will explore medical advances following the first world war.

The blog also gives a behind-the-scenes view of how the museum is working with veterans and medics to produce the exhibition. It uses a WordPress template, with information about the exhibition and associated activity easy to find.

So far, there are only a few blog entries, but these were for the most part short and accessible. Longer pieces full of interesting information really shine a light on what goes into putting on this sort of exhibition. A book blog is a useful addition, with examples of how fiction and non-fiction is helping to shape the content.

How much interest this sort of museum blog holds for audiences is unclear. But as a record of an exhibition and a research resource, it is a valuable addition.


A site that waves the flag for the UK’s creative sector

The creative sector generates £8m an hour for the UK economy, according to the Creative Industries Council, which has created a new website to promote the creative industries on a global stage.

The launch of thecreativeindustries.co.uk, which is supported by the British Council and Arts Council England, is intended to mark the start of a “year of creativity”.
The site’s design is big and bold; large images, including Grand Theft Auto and Doctor Who’s phonebox, dominate the homepage.

The navigation bar offers three initial options – UK creative overview, industries and resources – while more visually prominent articles at the bottom on the page include links to news and views, UK futures and highlighted cases.

The sections are hard to navigate, mainly because many of the articles appear in more than one place. There are plenty of facts and figures, news stories and other evidence supporting creative industries, but these are presented as grey text on a white background and are hard to read.

The site covers sectors as varied as advertising, craft, games and music. Art and culture have been lumped together, and the associated content neglects to break down what they mean in a UK context.

There are various case studies (including a look at Stories of the World, which many museums took part in as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012) and facts of figures about these sectors’ contribution to the economy. Potentially useful stuff, but it’s all a bit uninspiring.

The site’s main emphasis is to attract foreign investment and partners. That’s fair enough, but it’s done with so little imagination or attention to the actual value of the creative industries that what it’s promoting fails to shine.