This will be a wonderful resource – for teaching and simply for personal access to the publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most museum catalogs are short press runs and they end up out of publication.
Like other organizations, museums have had problems coping with the digital era: everything is easily replicated – there are no “original copies” in the digital environment – and yet museums are predicated on the uniqueness of the original art work. In some respects they are just like traditional libraries, founded on the principle of scarcity of what they have within their walls, and the need to conserve the works and control access.
Internet access and now eBooks are forcing libraries to reinvent themselves or become irrelevant. Museums have yet to face an “eBook-like” challenge for their holdings (though it will come at some point in the future) so they still have original works that cannot be easily replicated. But everything else they do can be and should be reproduced digitally and to the extent possible, be freely available. Otherwise, they will lose the ability to do outreach and be relevant to the needs of a changing society.
