CLEVELAND

“EVERY museum is searching for this holy grail, this blending of technology and art,” said David Franklin, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, in a tour of a ground-floor gallery in which touch screens loaded with interactive features offer new ways of viewing painting and sculpture. In recent weeks, he has been giving the tour to delegations from rival museums, and he expects, he said, to be “plagiarized, imitated and emulated.”

He may be right. “In the museum world, everyone’s watching Cleveland right now,” said Erin Coburn, a museum consultant who has worked at both the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though other museums have experimented with interactive technology, the extent of Cleveland’s program is unprecedented, she said. “They’ve put a lot out there for other museums to learn from.”

Mr. Franklin is standing in front of a 40-foot-wide touch screen that displays greeting-card-size images of all 3,000 objects on display in the museum. When a visitor touches an image, the screen enlarges it, arranges itself near similarly themed objects, and offers information like the location of the actual piece. And by touching a “heart” icon in the corner of the image, the visitor can transfer it from the wall to an iPad (one brought from home or rented at the museum for $5 a day), creating a personal list of favorites.

From the list of favorites, the user can devise a personalized tour, which can be shared with other users. “It’s very democratic. You can create a tour, and give it a funny name, and other people will follow it through the museum,” Mr. Franklin said. So far, more than 200 visitors have made their own tours, with names like “My new faves by Linda” and “Preston Loves Shadows.”