Meet Jeff Steward, our Director of Digital Infrastructure and Emerging Technology (DIET). The department handles everything from making sure museums staff can access their email to experimenting with gesture-based technology.

“Doing good things with interesting data” is DIET’s philosophy. Much of the collaborative work of its staff is dedicated to thinking innovatively about how we can share our information about the approximately 250,000 objects catalogued in our collections database, such as how each object was made, where it traveled before entering our collections, and what conservation treatments were performed on it. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how all of these new emerging technologies can work in conjunction with our rich collections of data and [how to] make a better museum experience for everyone.”

Watch Jeff Steward discuss DIET and the role of technology in the new Harvard Art Museums on Vimeo.