April 09, 2001, 10:54 AM — DEEP INTO THE Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), past the main exhibit hall, past the special exhibit of Impressionists, beyond the famous armor court, Chief Registrar Mary Suzor inspects a diminutive statue. Hunched over an antique mahogany desk, Suzor works in the shadow of a series of huge oak file cabinets that line the back wall of her office. More than 100 drawers across, the cabinet contains nearly 45,000 fading index cards with information about every item the museum has owned since it opened in 1916.
Technology has displaced old card files from Chief Registrar Mary Suzor's work. Collections managers of yesterday referred to these cards 20 to 30 times a day, constantly updating information by hand as it became available. Today, however, the catalog is more of a museum relic, thanks to a new, Windows-based collections management system and museumwide strides in information technology. The system, named after the Greek painter Apelles, enables Suzor to manage data -- details about a work's provenance, its artist and materials used -- about every museum object electronically, with some keystrokes and a few clicks of her mouse.
"My job has changed dramatically over the last few years," she says with a hint of nostalgia and a touch of relief. "Technology is responsible for it all."
IT is transforming the museum experience around the country, from the venerable CMA to the Experience Music Project, a new music museum in Seattle. Once remarkably low-tech institutions, these nonprofits are turning to IT in record numbers to streamline processes and cut costs across the board. At most museums, IT efforts are led by someone in the finance department or by a technologist who reports to a vice president. Yet at the CMA, IT falls under the auspices of CIO Leonard Steinbach, a frenetic, fast-talking, ponytail-wearing transplant from, as he says, "big, bad Noo Yawk."
Fresh off a three-year stint at his hometown's Guggenheim Museum, Steinbach is regarded by many industry bigwigs as a champion of IT in the nonprofit world. One year into his tenure at the CMA, he's proven himself with innovative initiatives that include a spanking new website, a highly regarded distance education curriculum and a grandiose effort to digitize every object in the museum's collection. Though the 48-year-old insists that technology isn't essential for museums to survive, he sees IT as a catalyst for moving museums into the 21st century and beyond.
"Art, not technology, is a museum's core competency," he states dryly. In his view, museums should use technology to make art accessible to everyone. "IT is an enabler, something we can use to bring people and art closer together. Can a museum exist without technology? Sure, most of them have done it for years. But how can a museum use technology to play more of a role in people's lives? That is the question I'm herre to solve."
The CIO in His Studio
Steinbach's basement office at the CMA is a museum in and of itself; he displays more gadgets and gizmos than a child obsessed with Pokemon. There's a pair of TOMY hoppers, a model 1964 Chrysler Turbine, a plastic pinball machine and, of course, some Star Wars figurines.
These items have followed Steinbach everywhere in the past decade, and as recently as last September, they lined his shelves at the Guggenheim, where he was hired in 1996 after two years as the National League of Nursing's vice president for IT.
Back then, the Guggenheim's IT infrastructure consisted of disparate local area networks running off DOS computers. As Steinbach remembers today, the institution was so behind the times that its "fax machines didn't even work right." During the
next three years, he converted the museum from DOS to Windows, consolidated a half-dozen LANs into a wide-area network and partnered with Novell to establish a virtual private network that bridged the Guggenheim with its sister institution in Bilbao, Spain.
Across the industry, these accomplishments did not go unnoticed. In the spring of 1999, CMA officials approached Steinbach to come to work for them. The museum had never employed a CIO, but after rewriting their strategic goals that winter, museum officials and other members of the board of directors were eager to establish the position for the future. According to Assistant Director Stephanie Stebich, museum officials knew exactly what they wanted their CIO to do, and they knew they wanted Steinbach to do it.
