New Features Include Gallery Overviews, Interactive Floor Plan, and Suggested Itineraries for Planning Museum Visits
(New York, September 26, 2011)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art has relaunched its website, www.metmuseum.org, it was announced today by Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Museum. Key features of the expanded and redesigned site include comprehensive access to more than 340,000 works of art in the Museum’s encyclopedic collections; extensive information and multimedia features on exhibitions, programs, and galleries; a completely new and streamlined design for greater ease of viewing the vast array of images, resources, and other material now online; and an interactive floor plan and multiple itineraries to enhance in-person visits to the Museum. The new website, which has been in preparation for three years, originally launched in 1996 and has not been thoroughly updated since 2000.
Mr. Campbell stated: “We hope that the new website will provide our online visitors with immediate, easy-to-navigate access to the works of art in our collection, including beautiful photography and in-depth information prepared by the Museum’s experts who study and care for them. We want the new site to present our global audiences with an elegant and user-friendly online experience of the entire Museum, inspiring visits to our main building and The Cloisters, and helping visitors move seamlessly between learning, planning, and participating online, and encountering face-to-face the magnificent works and the programs in our galleries. So many of our online features provide exciting ways to explore the resources of this great repository of art and scholarship. Some of these features are completely new, like the interactive map and suggested itineraries, and others are established favorites, like the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, which is now more fully integrated into the site and continues to expand in content. We hope to evolve our site with the same breadth, depth, and level of excellence that our many audiences have come to expect from this museum.”
Erin Coburn, the Museum’s Chief Officer of Digital Media, continued: “The new design and navigation reflect the wealth and depth of content that make the Met’s website a unique and valued resource. In addition to the new features that will help with planning visits, a new search interface and the addition of high-resolution images with zooming functionality will greatly enhance users’ abilities to explore the Met more thoroughly online. We’ve also designed portions of the website to be optimized for smartphones, so that visitors can easily look up information about the works of art while viewing them in the galleries. This relaunch represents a complete overhaul in how we support the Museum’s online presence and positions the Met to be more responsive to the ever-changing needs of the digital environment, while presenting the collections and scholarly resources in myriad new ways to foster learning and exploration.”
New general features of www.metmuseum.org include:
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Overviews of nearly 400 galleries at the Museum with a description and photograph of each, highlighted works of art within the gallery, and links to related content.
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The complete holdings of many collections within the Met are now accessible online, totaling more than 340,000 works of art and including all works from the Museum’s collection currently on view. Additional object records will be posted on an ongoing basis, with the goal of establishing records online for the remainder of the collection as expeditiously as possible. These records include links to the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, an exceptional resource providing chronological, geographical, and thematic explorations of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated by the Museum’s collections.
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A new design—elegant, clean, and simple—that brings the Met’s vast online resources into a unified website with a consistent look-and-feel, simplified navigation, and improved layout.
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A new and powerful search interface for the collections that accommodates complex searches, browsing, and simple ways to narrow results, as well as recommendations of related objects.
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High-resolution images of many of the works of art, with zooming functionality allowing for detailed exploration and analysis.
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A Media Gallery that centralizes an extensive range of videos, interactive features, and other interpretive media for visitors to enjoy.
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A Give & Join section with special content for Museum Members and information on ways to support the Museum.
New features to enhance or assist in planning visits to the Museum are:
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An interactive floor plan that can be used to locate galleries and special exhibitions, as well as facilities across the Museum. Each gallery links to an overview page featuring a description and photograph of the gallery, highlighted works of art, and links to related content.
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Suggested itineraries to help navigate the Met’s extensive collections, including maps, estimated durations, and insights and stories to enhance the journeys. One of the itineraries currently available is a tour of works selected and with commentary by the Museum’s Director Thomas P. Campbell.
The new website is a major initiative of the Museum’s Digital Media Department, in partnership with Cogapp, and with key support from the Museum’s Information, Systems, and Technology group. Staff from many areas around the Museum contributed content and expertise to the initiative.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s largest and finest museums, with collections of nearly two million works of art spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. Last year, the Museum received 5.68 million visitors at its main building and The Cloisters, and its website, www.metmuseum.org, received more than 45 million visits.
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September 26, 2011
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