"We have a lot of art programmes and workshops which are vibrant in nature and catered to students, teenagers and even art enthusiasts. Social media forms the best way to spread awareness about these events as well as the museum," Bilwa Kulkarni, education officer at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, said.
Recently, visitors to the Facebook page of this Mumbai-based museum, formerly known as the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India, were greeted with a quirky post: 'Mummy: The Inside Story'. It was about an upcoming exhibition on European civilization and generated much curiosity that translated into more than three lakh visitors to the exhibition that lasted about four months.
The Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, Delhi-based National Museum and Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai are among the other museums in the country looking to engage people through social media. Victoria Memorial Hall — conceived by then viceroy of India Lord Curzon as a tribute to Queen Victoria — is in talks with Prasar Bharati to film a documentary that would be posted on YouTube and Facebook. "The documentary will picture a better idea about the museum," Dr Jayanta Sengupta, secretary-cum-curator at Victoria Memorial Hall, said.
It was also the third Indian museum — after National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, and National Museum, Delhi — to be featured on Google Art, the internet giant's project to allow virtual tour of some top art institutions around the world.
Victoria Memorial Hall, the most visited museum in the country with 18 lakh visitors in 2012-2013, plans to launch a smartphone app soon to help the visitors with an audio tour.
The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya too plans smartphone applications for visitors. "We are working on the idea of creating mobile applications for the museum which will be geared at spreading information about the museum, visiting the museum and upcoming activities," Kulkarni said.
The museum's Twitter page too shall be active within a month, she said. Vijay Kumar Mathur, curator at National Museum, Delhi, said, "Every international museum has a strong presence on Facebook and nowadays when everyone is so connected to the medium, it was the next logical step for us to be a part of it."
Indian museums, however, are trailing international institutions in taking to social media to attract visitors from around the world.
"All major international cultural institutions are in a big way on social media," Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, director of Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, said. "In terms of what they are doing, we are slightly backward and need to strengthen our presence," she added. Mehta targets more than 50,000 followers for the museum's Facebook page, up from around 2,000 now.
Youth forms more than 70% of it visitors and Mehta plans to attract more of them. "Since the next generation is all accustomed to using smartphones and tablets, we are planning to introduce tablets/iPads inside the museum, which will have all the information about the collection in the museum, pictures, commentary by the curators, etc," she said.
The tablet will be available within the museum for an amount of `100 for visitors, said Mehta, who is also the vice-chairman of the Indian National Trust For Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach), which is campaigning to get Delhi crowned as an Unesco world heritage city.
Intach, too, has chalked out several programmes through social media to garner support for India's first nomination for a world heritage city.
Annabel Lopez, project coordinator at Intach, said, "We have to prove that our nomination is worthy and we have to have the confidence of various stakeholders — government, NGOs and the citizens — which is possible to a great extent through social media," she added.
Intach has been conducting various educational campaigns, heritage walks and radio shows that are promoted through social networking websites to showcase the Mughal walled city of Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi, and the colonial capital city of Lutyens Delhi among others.
"Social media has helped in reaching out to young people and we have had volunteers from schools and colleges who come during winter breaks and want to volunteer for the project," Lopez said. In January more than a thousand schools and around one lakh students from Delhi are expected to back the Intach campaign on Facebook in the run up to submit the final dossier for Delhi's world heritage city status.
The Indian Museum in Kolkata, the country's largest museum that is currently closed for revamp, too is generating interest on its Facebook page with more than 300 requests daily. "Our Facebook page talks about all the new features that would be added to the revamped museums," Sayan Bhattacharya, education officer at Indian Museum, said.
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