Here’s how it’s been for a very long time: you see a great exhibition, you tell a friend, and she asks, “Where was it?” Since at least the 1500s, as Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor’s The Origins of Museums reminds us, exhibitions have occupied architectural spaces - walk-in cabinets, galleries, parks with boundaries, for example. But as Nina Simon explains in The Participatory Museum, and has continued to explain in her Museum 2.0 blog, this is changing. An exhibition in today’s digital-media times really can be “anyplace from which visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content.”

Over the last year, NYPL has been experimenting with ways to think not outside the exhibition box, but in connection with it. If you can imagine the exhibition gallery as a container, then you can imagine making tiny pinholes in its walls and drawing colorful strings through them. These strings are ways to reach classrooms with exhibition content, extend people’s experiences after leaving the gallery, invite web users to contribute their own content, and so on. Once the exhibition ends, and the container is emptied, the strings can be collected and repurposed. Here are some examples of what we’ve been doing.

New video content 

For the exhibition, 100 Years of the Picture Collection: From Abacus to Zoology, we created a behind-the-scenes animation demonstrating how the collection is maintained. The animation appears online and in the gallery, where it is prompted by picking up a payphone handset. A second animation, coming soon, will show how you can use the collection. The videos will likely live elsewhere on nypl.org after the exhibition is deinstalled in May.

Instagram galleries

The web page for the exhibition, William Meyers: Outer Boroughs, included an image gallery  created through Instagram. The physical exhibition displayed photos Meyers shot exclusively in New York City’s outer boroughs. The web page’s gallery invited people to do the same: shoot photos in your borough, post them to Instagram with the hashtag, #myboroughNYC, and see them appear here. Users learned about the photographer’s work by emulating it, and together creating a constantly updating portrait of the city . . . minus Manhattan.

Interactive maps

The exhibition, Black Suburbia, explores a topic tied to geography. Making an interactive map that pinpointed the exhibition’s key content, and placing it on the web page seemed like an obvious decision. Once we began the work, a new opportunity became clear: We could ask people for their own stories of the black suburban experience, and we could add them to the map, demonstrating the continuing and collective nature of the exhibition’s narrative, and crowdsourcing an American story.

Resources for new audiences

In planning the Alice In Wonderland exhibition, Alice Live!, it was clear that children would be an audience segment. The curator, Charlie Lovett, planned a kid-height reader rail to wrap the gallery, and a treasure hunt worksheet to guide young people’s engagement with it. Getting the word out to families was of course the web page’s job, but we went further. We made the worksheets downloadable through the page, so that families could prep their kids before visiting, and made the download accessible through a kid-friendly button: an animated Cheshire Cat gif.

Mini exhibitions

The objects on display in Printing Women demonstrate women’s involvement in printmaking from the craft’s origin to the early 20th Century. Of course, as women are still making prints today, there was a current-day-influence chapter to be added to the exhibition. We placed this chapter on the exhibition’s web page. First, the curator chose a number of contemporary works from the NYPL collections. Next, we reached out to their creators for artist statements, which then laid the foundation for a guest blog series. Essentially, we expanded the exhibition by creating a small, neighboring, digital gallery in which one artist was showcased every two weeks.

The practice of extending exhibitions beyond their walls has been known to librarians and museum educators since at least 1912, when the Newark Museum, founded by John Cotton Dana, who was also the Director of the Newark Public Library, launched its object lending program. As described in The New Museum, Dana’s goal in this program was rooted in progressive education: “The museum that really affects schooling, then, being the one that teachers use daily, ought to be in the schoolhouse itself.”

Dana’s idea of the lending museum was conceived in argumentative opposition to expensive collections “presided over in the ancient manner by a few curators.” Lucky for us, digital media has rendered this dichotomy obsolete. We can have our wonderful exhibitions, brought to us by expert curators, and we can also enjoy their extensions. Their objects and experiences can be distributed beyond the gallery walls with relative ease, and not only that, but to millions of people at once.

Where the Library’s exhibition-based experimentation with digital-object-lending and digital-experience-extending is headed is still somewhat in the distance. But we now have some miles and milestones behind us, and that horizon does seem to be getting closer.