This IBM Corporate Community Relations project with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia began in January 1997. Our goal was to do much more than just provide technology to the Hermitage Museum. We aimed to transform how people around the world experience the Hermitage Museum and its collections. The partnership with a world class cultural institution like the Hermitage marks IBM's web debut in the cultural arena and represents another powerful opportunity for IBM to demonstrate its leadership in providing leading edge e-business solutions to help customers leverage their existing assets. The project required IBM to tap into variety of competency centers around the globe and involves four key technology initiatives.

The State Hermitage Museum web site is yet another demonstration of IBM's leadership in the web arena and an impressive addition to our extensive portfolio of compelling, highly-trafficked Web sites for high profile customers, partners and corporate sponsorship projects. In short, this web site allows the world to experience the masterpieces of the Hermitage collections from anywhere in the world using IBM Digital Library technology. This Digital Library and the web site that makes it accessible to the world is based on IBM RS/6000 computers and IBM Digital Library software from the IBM Santa Teresa, California Lab. The special application software, which is the heart of the site, was developed in IBM's e-business Solution Center in Naples, Italy and the site design and user interface of the web site was created by IBM's e-business Services in Atlanta, Georgia.

High resolution images are provided by IBM's specialized Image Creation Studio using patented IBM technology developed at IBM's Watson Research labs in New York to digitize art objects and protect images. The web site itself supports both English and Russian. Translation work was provided by IBM East Europe / Asia in Moscow, Russia and by Hermitage specialists. The site provides important historical information on the Hermitage, its extensive collections, numerous offerings, events, membership and special exhibitions.

As the technology sponsor of this comprehensive project, the Hermitage web site is powered by the same IBM server complex as the Nagano '98 site, the Official site of the Olympic Winter games sponsored by IBM, recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the most highly trafficked sporting web site in history.

The site features a searchable database of high resolution images from 12 different categories of works of art (painting, sculpture, jewelry, etc.), HotMedia images of selected halls and artworks, QBIC Search (Query By Image Content), and a newly developed "Zoom View" Java-based technology created by the IBM Haifa Research Lab (located in Israel) especially for this project. It enables the viewer to zoom in on a specific part of an image for detailed analysis and to read descriptive material at the same time.

At the core of the web site is the infrastructure or network utilized to host it. It includes multiple "farms" of IBM RS/6000 servers located at IBM Global Services sites in the United States which serve worldwide Internet users' requests. These sites use primarily RS/6000 Scaleable POWERParallel Systems, known as "SPs" for short. The SP is a high performance, massively parallel processing, computer that links together as many as 512 RS/6000 processors to handle complex, data-intensive computing jobs. Think of it as a supercomputer that can break up a single job into multiple parts, which different processors within the SP work on simultaneously - or "in parallel"! This highly redundant infrastructure makes it possible for the Hermitage web site to support millions of "hits" each day.

The heart of this entire project is IBM's Image Creation Studio based on IBM Research's Pro/3000 Scanner with PC's and special image processing software, which produce high quality, high resolution digital images from originals or transparencies of works of art from the Hermitage collections. The images feature IBM's patented digital invisible watermark technology to protect Hermitage image usage rights. For this project, 2000 images have been scanned and retouched by the Hermitage Museum staff, who have been trained on the technology by the Research staff in Yorktown Heights, USA.

The Education and Technology Center is located in the Rastrelli Gallery of the Museum and consists of seven workstations available for museum visitors as well as two development stations for museum staff. The Center will enable the Hermitage visitors to use the power of IBM technology to study the museum's art treasures in new and unique ways.

Today two art curricula, jointly developed by the IBM East Europe/Asia Education Center in Moscow and Hermitage specialists, are offered at the Education and Technology Center. The first one is "Gospel Subjects in Western European Art from the Collection of the State Hermitage." Users will be able to become acquainted with the main events from Evangelistic history, which has been a source of themes in Western Europe art for centuries. The program covers artistic guidelines for depicting religious subjects (iconography), the special meaning of symbols in art compositions (symbolism) and the changes during the period between the 14th and 18th centuries among different Western European art schools. The specifics of the curriculum design will make it possible for users to visually compare the works of art belonging to different museum exhibitions, and thus to follow the sequence of the evolution of the genre. Various functions such as zooming and narration enable viewers to look at the art from different angles and in sharper detail that are sometimes impossible to discern at exhibitions. A short question and answer exercise enhances the visitor's artistic knowledge. The first curriculum is especially designed for visitors age 15 and above. The second curriculum, "Ancient Subjects in Western European Art from the 16th to the 20th centuries from the Collection of the State Hermitage," is intended for 10-13 year old children. The curricula introduces younger students to artists and sculptors from ancient Greece and Rome, who have served as the inspiration for Western European artists for many centuries.

Four Visitor Information Kiosks are installed within the Hermitage Museum buildings and allow museum visitors to learn more about museum news and events, to explore the museum through its highlights, collections and floor maps and to take suggested and individualized tours. The kiosk application also provides navigational information about routes from the kiosk locations to museum highlights in the form of floor maps and textual descriptions. Navigation information is generated dynamically, based on daily updates of halls and works of art that are currently available. Navigation information is represented on screen and can also be printed out at the user's request. All information is provided in both Russian and English Languages. The kiosks are PC's equipped with touchscreen monitors and printers. All the equipment is enclosed within specially designed kiosk housings that protect equipment and visually compliment the marvelous Hermitage interiors. The Java-based software created by the IBM Haifa (Israel) Research Lab is the first to use Java technology in an IBM kiosk application.