ARTSBEAT; Met on Google Goggles

Over the past year visual-art obsessives have been having a field day with the feature of the Google smart-phone app called Google Goggles, which allows a user to shoot a picture of something - a painting, a photograph, a poster - and in seconds see an identification of the image and a list of search results for more information about it.

The app, which was introduced for Android phones in late 2009 and last year for the iPhone, has been getting much better recently at digging up the title, artist and art-historical provenance of the work that the phone camera is looking at. Part of the credit for that can go to holders of huge art-image databases like the J. Paul Getty Museum, which provided Google several months ago with access to several hundred images from its collection, becoming the first museum to do so.

Now the Metropolitan Museum of Art has gotten involved. It announced Friday that it has supplied more than 76,000 images of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs in its collection to the project, meaning that if you come across a reproduction of a painting that rings a bell - like ''Juan de Pareja'' - but can't remember who painted it, your phone can tell you within seconds that it was Diego Velazquez. The app then directs you to the work on the Met's site, for example, which tells you where to find the painting in the museum and gives you much more information about it. (Two-dimensional works function best with the app; it tends to struggle with sculpture, so the Met has so far stuck to paintings and other works on flat surfaces.)

In a statement Thomas P. Campbell, the Met's director, described the partnership with Google as ''a milestone in our efforts to provide greater access to the museum's holdings for a global audience.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

Source: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE1D8163AF934A25751C1A9679D8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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