Jeff Steward Email and Phone Number

Jeff directs the museums on the use of a wide range of digital technology. He manages a team of ten. He oversees core infrastructure (including the collections database, APIs, and photography studio) along with research into new applications of technology. For the opening of the new Harvard Art Museums in November 2014, he helped launch the Lightbox Gallery, a public research and development space.Major activities and accomplishments: • Manage and lead a team of 10+ staff including developers, digital archivists, database specialists, photographers, and fellows.• Plan and oversee an annual operating budget of ~$1,000,000.• Initiated research, starting in 2012, on the applications of computer vision (CV) and artificial intelligence (AI) in art museums. Built a reference dataset containing >70 million AI generated descriptions of art. • Initiated the museum’s open access program to make the entire art collection available as data through public application programming interfaces (APIs). The museum’s APIs have been used by more than 8,000 individuals for personal and professional projects as well as by professors teaching statistics, data science, data visualization, and computer science.• Initiated and created the museum’s first technology fellowship, a 2-3 year program for those starting careers as museum professionals. • Conceived of and built the museum’s public R&D space, the Lightbox Gallery, where we’ve hosted over 70 collaborative, interdisciplinary interactive digital projects from 2014-2012.• Designed and built the new department of Digital Infrastructure and Emerging Technology in 2012 as part of the museum's 6+ year building renovation and expansion project.

• Planned and developed a wide range of technologies including experimental AR projects for exhibitions and APIs for public access to collections information.• Designed interoperable business software including a system for processing and synchronizing more than 100K image files and metadata between Harvard’s Digital Repository Service and the museum’s collections management system.• Started and hosted a series of informal lunchtime talks to introduce non-techie museum staff to technology including photogrammetry, Arduino, and Project Natal (aka Kinect).

• Administered the museum’s SQL-based collection management system, which tracks more than 250, 000 art objects. • Planned and upgraded the database server through several major versions. • Wrote scripts for automating the backup of production databases to a disaster recovery environment.• Participated in the Museum Data Exchange project, a collaboration of five museums with a goal of opening our collections data for harvesting through standard protocols.

In 2010 the Museum of the Modern Snowglobe (MoMS) was developed and built as an experimental museum and laboratory for testing new operating models for museums. MoMS started as a digital-only museum but was then realized as a physical museum in Somerville, MA from 2010-2012.

In 2005 I started an online catalog of everything I’ve baked as an exercise in building sustainable, low effort websites. WIJB is also an on demand baking service for family, friends, and colleagues. I am the lead baker, lead taste tester, and lead software engineer.

• Designed infrastructure and provided technical support for the museum’s suite of collections management tools used to track over 500,000 art objects. • Developed more than two dozen software applications that work with the The Museum System (TMS) collections database to facilitate procedures and workflow including a batch import utility, which has facilitated the inclusion of more than 260,000 media assets since its implementation in 2000.• Designed and wrote the Digital Image Resources suite of three desktop and Web-based applications has streamlined the way that photographic documentation of the museum's collections is ordered, processed, cataloged, and shared with the public.• Built ETL data pipelines to publish data and images from internal, secure servers to public facing web servers including the MFA's website and The Giza Archives Project.

• Managed data integrity project in preparation for data migration from the Microsoft Access–based Imagebase to the FileMaker Pro Art&mis database• Data exporting and mapping for migration to TMS• Development of proprietary plug-ins to enhance TMS functionality and streamline MFA workflow