I always look at art museums as being a problem to start with that has to be solved, how you break through that formality and that protective culture to provide access to the artist’s intention.

I’m Max Anderson, the Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

I think we have an unusual approach as an art museum in Indianapolis. We don’t start with a very formal place setting and put it out there and assume people will take it. We try to put a lot out there that goes far beyond what’s asked of us, and we do so in a way that we hope is useful and informative for a member of the general public or a professional critic or journalist or reporter or law maker or funder.

We built a dashboard a couple of years ago as a way of seeking nuggets of information that would tell a story beyond what everybody talks about. What everybody talks about in art museums is how many people are visiting, how many big shows they’ve had, how many members they have, and in effect, how much they’re succeeding on a commercial basis, very little of which interests us.

You know, there’s a misplaced emphasis in museums on commercial models, and the simple example of that is that 96% of the revenue of art museums is not from ticket sales. So I begin my working budget every year with the staff not saying, “How do we increase ticket sales?” because going from 2% or 3% to 4% wouldn’t really make any difference in terms of our operating revenues anyway. So why would we obsess about that in a way that would affect our creative choices?

We’re trying to understand things that matter in measuring our mission very directly, like how many new works of art have gone into the permanent collection this month, how many hours of electricity and consumption can be documented that have been effective or ineffective.

I think we’re selective about what we provide, but we try to make sure that it’s critical information, that it allows someone to have an understanding of the real mechanics behind decisions and outcomes. I want to ask everyone who comes through the door, “What’s your zip code?” which we do, and publish in real-time on the Web so we can begin to understand who is being served in our community. And if the underserved parts of Indianapolis are not visiting us, we know that, and we’ve developed a strategy through market and education to go talk to people in that zip code.

Our endowment is a big part of the Indianapolis Museum of Arts’ financial stability. When reporters call and say, “Would you tell us what your endowment is?” our communications office says, “It’s on the website.” And I guess we start with the perspective that we don’t really make explosives. We’re not in trenched warfare. What is it we’re doing that needs to be secret?

I think the problem with museums hiding things is that it’s almost impossible in an age of people texting on portable devices in a gallery or in a storeroom to alert someone to and with a [kleedako] that something’s wrong. And so, in fact, it’s probably worse today to be hiding things than in the past because in the past, there were currencies that could be traded with professional journalists and critics. They’re called dinner parties, cocktail invitations, welcoming you into the inner embrace, and that was the currency that was traded.

Well, I think today there’s so many people who have no dog in that hunt. They have no interest in being coddled and looked after socially, or they have no access to it, or they live miles — thousands of miles away that that currency is longer operative.

We don’t see the point in keeping that information confidential when it can achieve two objectives if we put it out there by ourselves. One, we’re saying to the public, “This is who we are. Come and assess us, learn about us, and maybe get engaged in us.” And, two, it helps us manage better. Federal agencies, foundations, corporations, private individuals who have been our traditional supporters have used the dashboard in evaluating their grants and understanding the impact that they’re having on us.

What we have in-house is a set of professionals who are programmers, who are code writers and who write middleware and develop software and solutions. We have production unit for basically videography and high-end production in high definition. So we have a team that’s unusual in any art museum, and that’s what allows us to do it. But all that means, therefore, is you have to allot a certain amount for salaries, and that’s what we do. We don’t hire out. We don’t contract out. We don’t have to go find a pot of money to develop something that will inevitably be out of date by the time it hits, and instead, we’re on a constant trail of innovation.

Every application we build and every project we launch begins with the premise that it’s built [to quadruple] or it’s built open source, it’s made available to anyone in the community. We want people to add to it, to augment, to make suggestions and embroider at their end, but we don’t make the assumption that what we’re doing is for our unique benefit.

I’ve learned one thing in 20 years in this game, which is that if you look to be the best and the fastest and the brightest without sharing with everybody else, you end up being alone, and as an institution, we don’t want to be alone. We want to be in partnership with a lot of others.

Art Babble at artbabble.org is a clearinghouse for digital information about works of art. Art Babble started as a premise that we would look for the most innovative institutions creating video content and invite them in to submit whatever they chose.

We’re looking for great video about works of art, experiences in and around the art world that can make museums and galleries and public spaces more welcoming. We’re trying to make a case that video is the best way to learn about art experiences, short of being somewhere.

So our hope is that we can begin to provide a safe space in the world of content which isn’t mediated by commercial and narratives. It isn’t mediated by a kind of fusty institutional voice of the caliber of the greatest institutions alone. It’s opened at lots of institutions, and it’s not the chaos of YouTube.

But, obviously, the next chapter is to make that content portable in the galleries in a way that’s unobtrusive for the nonuser, so we’re building an app for the iPhone called Tap, T-A-P, which is going to be an open source platform for video, still images, text, and all sorts of information where a viewer can have access to that in the course of an exhibition.

We tend to think, for whatever reason, that being in Indianapolis, we’re not in the center of the known universe, I’ve been told. So the more we can rely on innovation and access, the more we have a chance at being part of a larger conversation about art and museums.

You know, it’s very easy, relatively speaking, with the ingenuity of our Chief Information Officer Rob Stein and his team and our new media director [Daniel Inganowa] to produce these extraordinary experiences. It’s much harder to take one of the 10 largest art museum buildings in the United States and make the experience in there as lively and as exciting and compelling and fluid as we can do electronically.

So what I look at the dashboard being is a kind of scout that’s leading us into institutional behavior throughout the museum, both in the public eye and offsite in areas like storage and conservation, where the public very rarely, if ever, goes. We should be looking at practices that are [equally porous] and open, and the same is true with works of art, that the experience of an object shouldn’t be limited to kind of piece of puffery about its importance in some [saris] English accent over the value of this object. There should be multiple voices that discuss that object, different points of view. In order to make clear, there is no single correct interpretation of a work of art.