"The Thinker"

On September 30, 1996, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco launched their Web-site called"The Thinker" www.thinker.org, allowing complete access to the museums' entire print and drawing collection via the Internet. Based on 4D's relational database, 4th Dimension, the museums created a searchable database enabling easy accessibility to over 60,000 Images. The Thinker (named for Auguste Rodin's 1880 sculpture) combines artwork from the The California Palace of the Legion of Honor and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, creating the largest collection of prints and drawings on a single site.

According to Harry S. Parker III, Director of the Museums, the combined print and drawing collections from The California Palace of the Legion of Honor and the M.H. de Young are too large to exhibit at any one time. Less than one percent of the collection can be displayed, with the remainder in storage. Combining Internet and database technology, The Thinker site allows everyone full access to the entire collection.

Robert Futernick, chairman of FAMSF's Conservation Departments, developed the database and credits the The Thinker launch to the power and ease-of use of 4th Dimensions (4D) technology. Futernick states,"we undertook the whole project as an in-house effort. We wanted to specifically tailor our needs, allowing for changes as they were required. Our current 4D database, though fully implemented and used by over 40 staff members, is still considered under construction. Though all programming was done by us, we consulted with and received help from many in the 4D developer community in order to really take full advantage of 4th Dimension's features."

Futernick started the project in 1992 with the initial idea of inventorying the museums' collection of art on paper. The renovation of The California Palace of the Legion of Honor from 1992 to 1995 created an opportunity to undertake an extensive collection management project. As he took on the task of upgrading inventory records and improving the storage and conservation of the art, Futernick created a program to catalog and digitize the works on paper; first for in-museum purposes using 4D Server, and now for world-wide access on the Internet.

The 4D Solution

Futernick originally created a flat-file database using FileMaker Pro to collect records, but the database requirements quickly expanded beyond FileMaker Pros capabilities. The lack of a programming language and the inability to efficiently link thousands of data records to image files motivated the switch to 4D. 4D also allowed Futernick the ability to create a large indexed"word soup" which facilitates lightning fast searching of all relevant database fields from a single search box. Users in the Museum or on the web can combine the name of an artist (for example) with subject words to quickly retrieve Images in new and sometime surprising combinations.

Futernick first discovered 4D in 1989 when 4D, Inc. of Cupertino, California held their annual developers conference at the Legion of Honor. During the conference planning, Futernick met with 4D officials and was invited to attend the conference to learn about the company and its database products. He was impressed by 4D's relational capabilities and its ability to reference digital Images.

After choosing 4D, Futernick wanted to optimize web performance and purchased a 150-megahertz Indy SGI with WebForce's server software. A 12-gigabyte hard drive was used to store the 60,000 art Images and the site's 600 static web pages. He installed Webstar, 4D Runtime and a slimmed down cloned version of the Museum database on each of his machines, linking them all together with the SGI via ethernet.

Futernick explained,"you hit the SGI when first arriving at the site. Navigation to most of the site is handled by the SGI server. However, when the user selects the image base for searching, the request is passed to one of four Macs. The Mac, 4D, and Webstar handle the search and send back text and the URL's for the selected thumbnails and Images living on the SGI. It is a bit of reverse engineering but the resulting performance is quite amazing, even with heavy use." In the first nine days of operation, the web-site received 35,000 hits and served 250,000 web pages. Over 150,000 searches were conducted and people sent about 1,000 messages through the site's guest book."

" One of the big attractions is that viewers don't need to be experts to find and enjoy the art. They can browse the database using their personal interests as their guide."

Futernick wanted to create an easy to use engine with an intuitive user interface that could quickly search The Thinker's vast collection of works by artist, title and category. Futernick explains,"we created a word analysis called"Word Soup," consisting of artists, media, titles, and free-text descriptions. The Thinker's search engine is fast because we did an analysis on all the words in the database and found 58,000 unique words in the soup. We analyzed them for frequency and sorted them in a separate 4D database. After that, we found the 1,000 most frequent words and stored the sets on each of the four Mac servers in their hard drives. By creating pre-built searches for the most popular words, it reduced the search time to less than one minute. The servers try first to return the set and, if there isn't a set, they conduct a search. NetLink/4D from Foresight Technology of Fort Worth, Texas, allows you to run several searches at the same time."

The end result is an easy to navigate on-line exhibit containing more works of art than any museum in the world. Users can browse through the collection's database using their personal interests as their guide. The site also includes exhibition schedules, collection summaries, guided tours, guides to American and African art, and poems written by students on objects from the collections.

The Future of the Thinker

Eventually, Futernick would like to add every piece of the museums' art to the Web site. He comments"we would like to photograph and digitize the paintings, sculptures, ceramic pieces, and ancient artifacts and add them to the site. This would display our entire collection of about 120,000 pieces on the Internet." Futernick mentions he is considering making his program available to other museums and galleries so they can create similar sites, and make the art world more accessible to everyone. Futernick concludes,"the great thing about developing this product in-house with 4D is that we can change it as our needs change. The advantage of distributing it as shareware is that others, with the help of 4D developers, can easily modify the source to best meet their specific requirements." Currently approxiamtely 50 percent of the museums collection can be viewed online.

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