PUTTING PREHISTORY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

With the concentration of an Indian medicine man playing out some ancient ritual, Steven A. LeBlanc, curator of archeology at the Southwest Museum, stared intently at a black-and-green computer screen and hit several keystrokes.

Immediately, a century-old Acoma Pueblo jar popped up on the screen, displaying a stark geometric pattern etched in black and white. On a second screen, vital statistics spewed forth, listing among other things the item’s age, origin, material and precise location in the 79-year-old Highland Park museum.

LeBlanc was applying society’s newest technologies to a science that studies its oldest achievements. With a powerful computer data base and laser video technology, he can search and locate vital statistics and photos of prehistoric artifacts without ever stepping into a storage room. The museum has already computerized and photographed 125,000 records and LeBlanc estimates that its entire inventory of half a million items will be on line by Thanksgiving.

Southwest Museum professionals and some museum computer experts say this system is one of the most sophisticated tools available today for collections management. Other museums around the country have experimented with image and text coordination, but none have succeeded on the scale of the little Southwest Museum in Highland Park, according to a museum analyst at Questor Systems Inc., the L.A.-based company that designed the museum’s computer system. Museums traditionally display only about 5% of their holdings at any given time, so the possibilities can be staggering, LeBlanc said.

UCLA’s Museum of Cultural History saw demonstrations of the computer at the Southwest Museum and began to install its own last week. Director Christopher Donnan praised it as “tremendously revolutionary.”

“We’ve been waiting for years for someone to come up with a computer system for museum management,” Donnan said. “This one does everything we had hoped for, and more.”

This week in New York, LeBlanc and former curator of anthropology Peter H. Welsh--who helped design the system and is now chief curator at the Heard Museum in Phoenix--discussed computerized collections management at the annual meeting of the American Assn. of Museums, the industry’s nationwide professional organization.

Experts point out that a number of museums already offer interactive video as an educational tool for special exhibits; some, such as the Air and Space Museum and the National Gallery in Washington D.C., even sell videodisk copies of selected collections. But the Southwest is one of the first to place such a large inventory on videodisk.

Another is the George Eastman house in Rochester, N.Y., an independent photography museum with 450,000 photographs. About 50,000 are currently on videodisk, said Andrew Eskind, its director of interdepartmental services.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu is “very interested” in applying the technology to collections management but is still conducting research, said Lori Starr, Getty’s head of public information.

Some museums find that an integrated video and computer system doesn’t suit their needs. Suzannah Fabing, managing curator of records and loans for the National Gallery, says the museum considered one but decided that visiting scholars would be dissatisfied with the quality of video reproduction for painting.

Other museums, including the Lowie Museum at UC Berkeley, the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, are quite interested, LeBlanc said. Most recently, the curator received a call from the offices of Steven Spielberg asking about a similar program for the film industry.

Users can search for specific items or request more general lists using a cross-indexing system of 50 variables, such as culture, geographical location, material and size. Users who want to identify a particular group of artifacts, for example, could request all beaded Sioux Indian moccasins designed for ceremonial wear. Within minutes, the computer searches its inventory, lists all known information about the artifact or group and is ready to begin displaying full-color, close-up photos.

Recently, an archeologist from Ecuador visited the Southwest Museum looking for prehistoric artifacts from that country and had a list within two minutes. In the old days, staff members might have spent days poking around in different storage areas looking for baskets, clothing and other items.

Questor and the Southwest Museum jointly own the software program copyright, and LeBlanc estimates that purchasing and programming the system can cost between $50,000 and $125,000. The Southwest received a $200,000 grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to pay for hardware, software and staff time, LeBlanc said.

To computerize all records, museum workers spent tedious hours photographing each artifact and inputting “every scrap of paper we had” into the computer, LeBlanc said.

Another problem the staff encountered was that the museum had never been inventoried. Handwritten catalogue cards, some dating back 75 years, were nearly illegible, and several different coding systems made record keeping “messy and difficult,” LeBlanc recalled.

A scholarly man with a bushy, russet-colored beard and green eyes, LeBlanc received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and has written or collaborated on nine books on archeology.

Originally from Pasadena, he recalls visiting the fortress-like Spanish adobe building atop Mt. Washington as a child. There, in the museum founded by writer and historian Charles Fletcher Lummis, which perches high above the Pasadena Freeway, a curator once sat 7-year-old LeBlanc down on the museum’s front porch and taught him how to chip arrowheads, the curator recalls.

Today, at 43, he envisions placing video terminals in each gallery so that visitors and schoolchildren can request more information about exhibits of pottery, baskets, silver jewelry, Navajo rugs and kachina dolls. (Fourth-graders visit the museum in droves each year as part of a prescribed course in Native American history.)

How does he account for the Southwest Museum’s success when other larger, richer museums are still researching the field?

“Being a poor museum made us be lean and hungry and try harder,” LeBlanc said.