In the 1950s, a boy grew up in a 350-room palace where the salons and storage vaults hold 2.5 million works of art. This is not the story of a European prince and his aristocratic inheritance - Mikhail Piotrovsky was brought up in Russia under Stalin. But his father was director of the Hermitage, the fabled museum in the Tsarist Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Piotrovsky recalls his youth, wandering through an art collection unrivalled in the world. "It was a fantastic feeling. It is a museum, but it is also a palace, a monument. You feel the ghosts of Russian history." A career as an orientalist followed, with his expertise in Arabic history leading to membership of Moscow's renowned Academy of Sciences.
Since 1992, he has stepped into the role once taken by his father. He has won "the best job in the world" and become director of the Hermitage. The Hermitage is notorious for defeating visitors. The sheer scale of an art gallery that contains more than 500 masterpieces means visitors can only take in a small amount of the collection before they become overwhelmed. Piotrovsky reels off the top attractions with familiarity: "We have more than 20 Rembrandts, 20 Matisses, two Raphaels, two Leonardo Da Vincis . . ."
A visitor dedicating an entire holiday to the Hermitage would only touch the surface of the collection. "To see everything, you need a year," he says. The challenge presented by this amazing collection cries out for a radical approach. Piotrovsky found the solution to the problem confronting visitors to the Hermitage when he contacted IBM to design a digital catalogue of the collection which visitors could enter via the Internet.
The resulting site (www.hermitagemuseum.org) was opened in June. Most museums in the world argue for more funds. They use the argument of escalating visitor numbers to justify budget requests. When Piotrovsky took over seven years ago, he faced a grave situation. "It was in a bad condition, like all of Russia. Then it became worse. When we began to fight hard to develop the museum, our budget was one tenth of what it is today. We tried a new financial strategy of not relying on the state. So we keep the money we earn from entrance tickets and we use fund-raisers and grants from outside bodies."
IBM gave the Hermitage $2 million to fund this ambitious digital library. And Piotrovsky argued with the Ministry of Finance to give the Hermitage a separate line in the state budget and boosted funding to $10 million. "That took a lot of fighting, and it is not much: we can earn $4 million by ourselves," he says. But while this struggle was going on, visitor numbers declined dramatically against the background of a chaotic domestic environment. In 1989, the Hermitage had 3.5 million visitors. By last year, this figure had plunged to 1.8 million.
Piotrovsky seized on the opportunity presented by this bleak statistic. No-one wants to visit a gallery and find the view to their favourite painting blocked by hundreds of other people. If the Hermitage could exploit technology, it could reach out to an international audience and keep the museum in business while keeping visitors down to a practical number. "Technology can help us to regulate crowds. Everybody goes straight for their favourite painting. There is always a rush to see the Impressionists," he says.
He found that IBM's Yorktown Heights research laboratory in upstate New York was already working on ways to convey the experience of visiting a great art collection via the Internet. The idea was to get into far more detail than a CD-Rom could provide. The Hermitage site allows visitors to spin around and change their perspective within a room before zooming in on a particular work. With the collapse of communism, copyright became a big problem. Under the Soviet system, images were copied for no fee. But if the Hermitage is to project its collection globally and earn new revenues from reproductions, it must protect copyright. IBM has developed a digital watermark which is invisible to the human eye but can be identified by an expert witness for legal purposes. Piotrovsky says: "I can't tell you how it works, it is magic!".
The "magic" was performed by Fred Mintzer, a manager at Yorktown Heights, who recalls how the digital watermark came about: "It is something we were working on with the Vatican Library. We change the pixels that make up the texture of the entire image. A human eye cannot see this, but the new texture can be abstracted by a computer." Mintzer visited the Hermitage four times in the course of his work. "It is a wonderful place. I never missed an opportunity to wander through the hallways."
Alex Winokur works for IBM on the other side of the world, at its Haifa research centre in Israel. His team used Java and the IBM Digital Library, a multimedia database, to create stunning displays. One feature of the Hermitage site, called "embedded view" allows visitors to draw a frame around a picture on-screen and click to zoom in. The speed and simplicity of Java appealed to Winokur's team. He is particularly proud of the computer kiosks which IBM developed for visitors to the Hermitage. "You can look for a recommended tour based on the time you have. If a hall is closed for rebuilding, that information is used to alter your tour so you go via a different route."
More than 3,000 works have now been included in the Hermitage site. An in-house team is feeding more items into the Digital Library and will continue until all 2.5 million objects are available on the Internet. Like his father, Piotrovsky has a son who is very aware of the Hermitage. "He is not going to be the director here. He is in computers!" he says. Piotrovsky's son helped to build the website. He may not have followed the family calling directly but he, too, has helped the Hermitage to find a new direction for a capitalist 21st century.