Title: BAM/PFA Lauches Vast New Website
Hello fellow MCNauts,

Below is an announcement of the Berkeley Art Museum's all-new, all-improved website. Please forgive the boastful tone; it was written by our publicity office :) I'm most proud of the range of collections and scholarly resources we are now able to offer online, and the level of integration in searching across them (and *relatively* inexpensively too). But heck, I'm really writing to invite my colleagues on this list to check out the site, and if you are willing, offer a little professional criticism and feedback my way. Thanks for listening,

Richard Rinehart
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Media contact: Rod Macneil
(510) 643-6494
[email protected]

BAM/PFA LAUNCHES VAST WEBSITE


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BERKELEY, CA May 19, 2003-The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) today launched its new, redesigned website. With more than five times more records than previously, the website-www.bampfa.berkeley.edu-offers greater online resources than any other museum website in the Bay Area, and more than most museums in the U.S. New features include records describing the entire BAM/PFA collection, a greatly expanded archive of film-related materials, and the largest online museum store in California, making the website an unparalleled resource for both public and scholarly communities. These enhancements further underscore BAM/PFA's position as a leader in the presentation of cultural resources online, a position it has held since launching one of the world's first museum websites in 1994.
        Visitors to www.bampfa.berkeley.edu will be able to access complete information on BAM/PFA exhibitions, film series, and public programs, including daily and monthly schedules. The Museum Store's inventory of more than 4,000 books will also be available to search and purchase online, making it one of the largest online museum stores in California.

New and expanded features of the website:
… More than 13,000 records describing the entire permanent art collection of the
UC Berkeley Art Museum, 1,300 of them with images.
… More than 6,000 records describing the entire permanent film and video collection of the Pacific Film Archive.
… Access to more than 62,000 files, with images, documenting the collections of eleven other California museums.
… More than 14,000 PFA program notes, many of them comprising authoritative documentation of rare films, describing films shown at PFA from 1979 through today, searchable by title, year, director, credits, play date, or text.
… CineFiles-30,000 records from the collection of the PFA Library and Film Study Center, including rare archival materials and film documentation.
… A complete history of BAM/PFA's MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art-information on more than 200 exhibitions spanning over twenty years, including curator's essays, installation views, and video interviews with contemporary artists including Doug Aitken, Shirin Neshat, Ken Goldberg, Tobias Rehberger, and Peter Doig.
… Documentation including images of more than ninety BAM/PFA exhibitions dating from 1994 though today.

The BAM/PFA site provides unparalleled access to not only the museum and film archive collections, but also those of other important cultural institutions, all of which can be searched simultaneously. For the past six years BAM/PFA has led Museums Online Archive of California (MOAC), a groundbreaking initiative to make the collections of eleven California museums and libraries available online. Through MOAC, which is one of the largest online museum collaborations in America, visitors to the website will be able to simultaneously search 62,000 records with images, documenting the collections of institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Japanese American National Museum, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, and the California Museum of Photography.

Another innovative new feature of the website is Conversations, an online forum allowing Internet users to engage with the exhibition and film programs at BAM/PFA. Challenging the notion that communication between the artist and viewer only flows one way, Conversations uses interactive technology as a means of sparking ongoing, open discussions on a variety of topics. Via the BAM/PFA website, audiences from around the world are able to see and hear contemporary artists speak about their work, listen to international scholars discuss art and film, and listen to firsthand observations by museum visitors, recorded in the museum galleries. The new website will launch with forty-five video clips, including an exclusive interview with renowned artist Louise Bourgeois in which she discusses individually a series of fifty-nine drawings from her exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Drawings, which was presented at BAM/PFA in 1996. Conversations also features interviews with other artists-including many who have exhibited as part of the museum's MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, and observations and comments actually recorded on-site by museum visitors. Many of the video clips are also available in MP3 audio format for downloading to an MP3 player or Palm device.

T H E   U N I V E R S I T Y   O F   C A L I F O R N I A,  
B E R K E L E Y   A R T   M U S E U M   &   P A C I F I C   F I L M   A R C H I V E
Located at 2626 Bancroft Way, just below College Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus 
Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday 11 to 7 
Admission: General admission $8; Seniors and Students 12-18 years $5; BAM/PFA members, UC Berkeley students, staff and faculty, and children under 12 free; group tour member $3
(to arrange a group tour, call (510) 642-5188); Admission is free on the first Thursday of each month.
Information: 24 hour recorded message (510) 642-0808; FAX (510) 642-4889;
PFA recorded message: (510) 642-1124 TDD: (510) 642-8734 
Internet address: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
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Richard Rinehart
---------------
Director of Digital Media
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
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Digital Media Instructor
Department of Art Practice
art.berkeley.edu
---------------
University of California, Berkeley

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