By ALEX WRIGHT

In recent years, the rise of social media has given Web users the technological wherewithal to play a more active role in shaping the direction of museum collections.

In Warsaw construction crews have barely broken ground on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, scheduled to open in 2012, but already more than 800 Web users from all over the world have registered with the museum’s Virtual Shtetl project to help build a collection of more than 30,000 photographs, videos and audio recordings related to life in 1,300 towns with Jewish populations before and after World War II.

One day last summer Artur Cyruk was poking around an automotive junkyard in his home province of Podlasie, Poland, when he stumbled across the breastplate of a beautifully preserved 19th-century Torah. He took the object home, logged on to his Virtual Shtetl account and uploaded a photo. Within a few days curators had contacted him about acquiring the breastplate for the museum’s permanent collection.

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., a conversation is starting about the changing role of curators in a Web 2.0 world. That institution recently began an ambitious initiative called the Smithsonian Commons to develop technologies and licensing agreements that would let visitors download, share and remix the museum’s vast collection of public domain assets.

The Smithsonian’s new-media director, Michael Edson, described the initiative as a step in the institution’s larger mission to shift “from an authority- centric broadcast platform to one that recognizes the importance of distributive knowledge creation.”

There is the risk of promoting bad information and questionable judgments and of eroding the authority of institutional curators. In this sense museums are grappling with the same technological conundrum as other cultural institutions, like universities, publishers and newspapers: how to reconcile institutional principles of order with the liberating impulses of electronic networks.

“Many museums fear losing control,” said Nina Simon, a museum exhibition designer who is writing a book about participatory museum experiences.

New-media advocates argue that Web input can enhance the value of curatorial judgment.

“Curators are starting to realize that they can be challenged by the audience,” said Pascale Bastide, the Paris-based founder of the Museum of Afghan Civilization, an entirely Webbased institution scheduled to make its debut later this year. The museum will begin as a virtual collection of images drawn from institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art inNew York and the Louvre, but once it is up and running it will expand to include contributions from users, Ms. Bastide said. .

Mr. Edson said that encouraging participation did not have to mean abdicating curatorial control. “I think the public genuinely does want the Smithsonian to assert its authority,” he said, “but in this epoch authority and trust will be granted to institutions differently - through transparency, speed and a public orientation.”

Ultimately, the viability of Web-enabled museum collections may rest on curators’ ability to harness the technologies of participation without compromising their judgment. “There’s a difference between having power and having expertise,” said Ms. Simon . “Museums will always have the expertise, but they may have to be willing to share the power.”


A draft image from the Museum of Afghan Civilization, an entirely Webbased institution. / WWW.AFGHANCULTUREMUSEUM.ORG