Jane Alexander
Name: Jane Alexander
Current Job: Chief Digital Information Officer at The Cleveland Museum of Art
Favorite restaurant in town? L’Albatross (I went here ALL THE TIME while the museum was going through renovations. I love the food, the atmosphere and the people...and of course the celebrated cheese board)
Favorite thing about Cleveland? Opportunity to make a change - Cleveland is a true gem – a world class museum, orchestra, and innovative thinkers, which gives you the opportunity to make a real difference. Another thing I love is the culture, everyone here wants to support each other to make Cleveland a great destination.
Q: Jane, you started your career in NYC at Columbia, your alma mater. How did that experience shape your formative years in the technology world? While a student, I was the director of the Columbia Video Network. I led one of the first in the field, which allowed for university online-learning-environments, enabling working professionals from around the world and remotely-located students to benefit from part-time, online graduate engineering degree and certificate programs without having to be physically on campus. With a small entrepreneurial team, I developed strategy, branding and directed all aspects of the distance education program, as well as the development of university-wide backend resources for instructional technology and methodology.
With the Columbia Video Network, we not only enhanced the experience for those on campus, but we enabled those who could not make it to the physical campus to learn. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, making digital enhance a physical experience has always played into what I do. Using digital as a tool to be more inclusive, deepen audience relationships, and provide new ways to connect was especially important with Gallery One (the first iteration of ARTLENS Gallery), where the physical and digital were combined. This understanding of digital has come into play in the past few months with the pandemic as we’ve transitioned to a completely digital remote presence, finding ways for our visitors to connect meaningfully with our curators, staff, and collection.
Q: You ended up moving to Cleveland working at a variety of senior tech roles until joining the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2010. What drove your decision to join CMA? I grew up in NYC and went to museums all the time. I loved the architecture, but I didn’t have any experience in art itself, beyond reading the gallery didactics. My background is in architecture and applied math, and my career had been in information technology.
I came to CMA in 2010, in the midst of our building renovation project, where the museum was not only overhauling the physical structure, but the digital systems behind the scenes, too. One enticing factor was an upcoming major project: the opportunity to create tools to help visitors look more closely at art. This project allowed me to re-shape the museum’s back-end content management systems in anticipation of future projects, laying the groundwork for my biggest endeavor at CMA, which launched in 2012. This front-facing project, Gallery One, would combine art and digital to help people who didn’t have an art history background.
As a parent, and as an individual not from the art history world, there was a need I wanted to fulfill, for my kids, myself and the greater public, to break down barriers of entry to the museum space. What was great about Gallery One was that through digital, we created toolsets to help visitors not only understand our collection, but that of any art museum, and really all art. I think museums are a great resource, and I was excited about the opportunity to open this up to more audiences through technology.
I am also a big fan of CMA’s mission, “to create transformative experiences through art, for the benefit of all the people, forever.” Ask anyone I’ve worked with; I truly believe in this mission, and I bring it into every project I do. Using technology as a tool to create these transformative experiences has been my primary goal over the past decade.
Q: I visited CMA before COVID-19 and you all are working on some really cool things including ArtLens, can you talk about that project and how your team built it? ArtLens is an iterative project, I’ll say that first. It has gone through some major changes over the last decade, and everything we do surrounding that project is with the intention that we will update it in the future. As I mentioned, the project began a decade ago as Gallery One. I led a cross-collaborative team made up of representatives from multiple departments, from digital, technology, design, education and curatorial. Throughout the multiple iterations, we’ve worked with talented design and technology firms around the country. What was important for working collaboratively was defining goals for the space, and making sure all our choices were made with our goals and audience in mind.
The ARTLENS Gallery is a launching point – it gives visitors the toolsets to form relationships with the permanent collection through interactive play. They explore topics like composition, symbolism, purpose, gesture and emotion through gameplay. The current iteration of the gallery’s ArtLens Exhibition features 21 works of art and 16 interactives, six of which are projected. These artworks rotate every two years, and we are constantly updating the software and hardware in the space to continue making it the best that it can be. Some exciting changes in the latest iteration are the addition of interactive 3D models, made using photogrammetry. These are gesture based as well, so visitors can use simple movements to manipulate models.
With these new gesture-based interactives, we began to transition away from the touchscreen. We’re designing with a new kind of visitor in mind – the digital native. We also had the foresight that touchscreens would not only become outdated – but especially now, people don’t want to touch surfaces in public spaces. As the museum begins to reopen, a huge part of the gallery will be accessible, as it does not require touch. Since museums around the world are thinking about reopening in a post COVID-19 world, and how they’ll be able to use digital, CMA has been used as an example and more museums are considering non-touch experiences.
Another benefit of the six projected interactives is that without a touchscreen, people are really focusing on the content, which has always been a goal of the ARTLENS Gallery. We want our visitors to come away having learned more about art and ready to take those skills out into the permanent collection galleries. We actually found, through an analytics project last year, that visitors who spend more than five minutes in ARTLENS spend an average of 35 minutes more in the permanent collection galleries and visit more spaces overall. It has been really rewarding to see that we are actually achieving our goals with this space.
A huge part of the ARTLENS Project that ties into many other projects we do at CMA, is our back-end. All of our collection information systems are connected in such a way that updates happen dynamically. Once a curator or registrar updates a record, that change is reflected on all outward facing interactives within minutes, from the ARTLENS Gallery and App to our Collection Online, to our API. In 2019, we launched our comprehensive Open Access initiative, releasing over 30,000 public domain images and metadata for our collection and implementing resources such as our API and Git repository to make our collection more accessible than ever.
Q: What do you have in the pipeline for CMA visitors as it pertains to digital experiences? Before the museum closed in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were in the middle of preparing for a very exciting digital exhibition. This would be the first exhibition of its kind, with four completely digital galleries and several different kinds of immersive experiences. When the museum closed, we immediately shifted gears to focus on connecting with our visitors during the closure.
This has been a whirlwind couple of months for the museum’s digital innovation team, as you might guess. We found out we were closing on a Friday afternoon, and by Monday morning our team was already thinking about ways to bring art to people during quarantine. We already had a lot of good digital resources in place like our Collection Online, our API, and our ArtLens App. We immediately started thinking about our audiences – how people’s experiences and needs would change during this time. Instead of just re-working existing digital resources, we are creating new, sustainable, long-lasting tools that we could easily to package into a dynamic online experience called Home Is Where the Art Is.
Thanks to the work we’ve been doing for the past decade, making our back-end technological systems flexible and adaptable, we are able to react quickly and innovate in response to new situations. As an Open Access institution, CMA is able to use its collection in innovative and creative ways that meet our diverse audiences’ needs. On one hand, we can be very agile – within a week of closing, we launched our Exhibitions filters on our Collection Online, allowing visitors to see all the works in exhibitions currently on view. On the other hand, we can use the systems we’ve built over the past decade to create some really unique, thoughtful, and strong digital resources.
We recently launched our new “takeover” homepage at clevelandart.org. This page is a dynamic gateway into all the resources that CMA has to offer during closure, updated as we add new resources. Head over to our homepage to check out a new video exploring ways to connect with the museum remotely.
ArtLens for Slack is a tool for companies to maintain and support their remote workplace. People are getting tired of working remotely. Why? Remote working tools are not designed to accommodate the informal conversations and connections that build company culture. ArtLens for Slack offers a common space to connect with Art and with your coworkers. With the help of a daily prompt, the app curates an artwork around a theme. At five o’clock, the app will notify you with an announcement of your company’s exhibition opening, sharing an art exhibit from the entire team. ArtLens for Slack acts as a stand in for the traditional museum experience, allowing teams to curate and view daily art exhibitions with their coworkers, ultimately connecting over a “water-cooler” moment centered around art and inspiration. We’re having so much fun with slack, that we are considering moving to other platforms.
Open Access Dashboards: When the museum temporarily closed our doors, we immediately saw a rise in views on our Collection Online – this led us to wonder if there were similar patterns in Open Access downloads and views across repositories. In May 2020, we launched live dashboards, which update daily. It’s exciting to see how different the museum’s top 50 are in comparison to our top artworks on Wikipedia, and the explosive, exponential effect that our partner repositories have had on the international reach of our collection.
Visitor Art Gallery: While working from Home, CMA’s education staff release weekly creative prompts on our website and social media, aimed at students, families, and creatives of all ages. We’ve created a “visitor art gallery” where users can upload and share their creations, browse through other users’ artworks, and revisit the prompts that inspired them.
Desktop Dialogues: Every Wednesday at noon, join CMA curators, educators, and other invited guests in a live online discussion inspired by objects in the museum’s permanent collection that address issues people are facing today. Participate in the conversation by making comments or asking questions.
Collection Online: Explore every work in the collection, over 61,000 artwork records. Zoom into high-resolution images and 3D models, listen to videos, and explore in-depth interpretive content, including up to 36 fields of metadata such as Provenance, Citations, and Exhibition History. Find exactly what you’re looking for with a powerful AI search and visitor favorite filters, such as “African American Artists” and “CIA Alumni”.
Exhibitions Online: Launched in response to the temporary closure, new Exhibitions Online filters allow you to browse objects currently on view in special exhibitions and current rotations, such as PROOF or Tiffany in Bloom.
Open Access Initiative: Share, download, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of 30,000 public-domain artworks and metadata for CMA’s entire world-renowned collection for commercial and non-commercial purposes through Open Access. Explore through our Collection Online, API, and more.
Video Series: CMA’s weekly series shares the insights of CMA curators and staff on exhibitions, objects, and programs. In “On View Now”, join CMA curators as they explore exhibitions currently on view. In “On My Mind, CMA staff members explore artworks that personally resonate with them during this contemporary moment. In “Behind the Beat”, join CMA staff and artists in conversation on performing arts and music during quarantine.
ArtLens App: Explore the galleries from home on your smartphone or tablet. Create and share custom tours with students, classmates, and friends. Browse a curated list of tours created by the CMA, listen to custom interpretive content, or explore an interactive map. Now, you can create tours from home and share directly through our new deeplinking feature.
Q: What’s your life like outside the museum? You can probably guess from my background that I love architecture, but another passion of mine is the outdoors. I’m fascinated by organic structures as well as creating new things. I look for ways to connect with these two topics as much as I can in my free time. Last fall, I drove my daughter across the country to attend college for architecture, and we tried to stop at as many different natural wonders as we could. Whenever I’m not working, you can usually find me hiking or exploring interesting architecture. I am a lover of all-natural beauty, including Lake Erie! You can find way too many sunset pictures on my Instagram.