Six Lessons Learned: An (early) ARTstor Retrospective. RLG DigiNews 10 no.2 (April 15, 2006) (original) (raw)
Related papers
ArtSTOR, Art Libraries and Access to Images
Art libraries are, among other things, vast corpora of images. The pages of art publications are, of course, replete with images of interest to the scholar, teacher, and student. These images are notoriously poorly indexed, despite the efforts of catalogers and authors and publishers of indexes to the literature of art. This is surely one primary reason great art libraries tend not to be circulating art libraries: the only way for the library user to take advantage of this vast repository of images is if the books and journals are on the shelf! Teaching institutions, needing to provide photographic slides for classroom use, have always tended to respond to this situation by creating " copystand " slides from printed books and journals. Slide curators then classify and – more rarely – catalog these slides
Library resources & technical services
In 2001 the William Madison Randall Library at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington found itself with a substantial collection of art, acquired through gifts and purchases to augment existing collections of faculty scholarship and regional materials. What had been tracked in a simple administrative database had become a collection deserving improved access. This paper outlines the acquisition, cataloging and access issues that shaped the evolution of the art works from their status first as decoration on the library walls, then as fully cataloged library materials in the online catalog, then as digitized images available in a searchable Web tour. Explored are the reasons behind the collection development push and the methods of acquisition, how and why the collection outgrew its original inventory database, and why the University Librarian turned to catalog librarians for solutions to improve access by utilizing and linking data existing in separate databases. The paper offers implications and lessons learned that could assist other libraries that may face such a challenge, as well as a literature review of the issues faced in art documentation. Randall Library's experience illustrates how a decision to invest in cataloging an unusual medium can go beyond the basics of author and subject access to create an unusually valuable foundation for promotional, curricular, and Web-based ventures.
Creating Digital Art History: Library, Student, and Faculty Collaboration
Over the last two decades, teaching, learning, and research in higher education have developed a growing digital presence. Digital development in the humanities has been slow relative to most other areas in academia, and with some exceptions, art and art history have enjoyed slow digital growth within the humanities. Within this environment, the article here presents one collaborative model for digital art history, rare in its exclusive focus on undergraduate “junior scholars”. Undergraduate senior-level art history and studio art students at Providence College collaborate annually with art history and studio art faculty to publish their senior theses in print format as the Art Journal. In the last few years, students, faculty, and digital library staff have enhanced this collaboration to include the publishing from process to product of the Art Journal as a complementary digital Art Journal. They collaborate in creating digital art history and digital studio art in order to bring exponentially greater meaning, significance and visibility to the students’ senior culminating works through real-world digital publishing, including quality control, copyright issues, and ideas related to persistent access and ongoing global visibility for the scholarly and creative works, and for the student scholars. These students function as real-world collaborative scholarly partners in publishing their culminating academic and artistic work globally, and persistently accessible in Providence College’s digital repositories. This case study evidences engagement in meaningful digital knowledge creation focused on the intellectual and creative output of student-scholars and student-artists (art historians and studio artists) as a model for other student-faculty-digital library professional collaborations.
In Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Networks, and Community (ed. Robin Kear and Kate Joranson). Cambridge, MA: Chandos Elsevier., 2018
The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of common APIs developed to provide access to digital visual material from libraries, museums, and other repositories without the all-too-frequent need for a common viewing application. By using a common framework to collaborate across institutional silos, Harvard has leveraged the promise of IIIF in multiple functional areas, supporting the adoption of a new Harvard Library Viewer, walls of images in the Harvard Art Museums, and image collections embedded in Canvas and in massive open online courses from HarvardX — all in high resolution, and with unprecedented interactivity.
2017
“How do you build a model program for campus art from the ground up?” This is the question Andrée Bober faced a decade ago as founding director of Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas (UT) at Austin. The program stems from a 2005 university policy that aimed to engage the campus community by presenting works of art in the public realm. Bober's vision not only transformed the university's landscape, but also established Landmarks as a leading public art program in the country. Today the collection consists of 40 works of art, including 28 sculptures loaned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many additional projects underway. UT alumna Amanda Douberley spoke with Bober for this special issue of Public Art Dialogue.