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Words . . . will not stay in place: cataloging and sharing image collections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

James Shulman*
Affiliation:
ARTstor, 151 East 61st Street, New York, NY10065, USA
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Abstract

Words have been affixed to still images for hundreds of years to describe who created a work or what it portrays. This paper examines the ways this process might evolve in an era where dissemination of knowledge is far less linear than it was in an age of print, and reviews two projects that ARTstor is pursuing with the art historical community. One captures users’ notes about 190,000 photographs of old master drawings that are in need of updated descriptive cataloging. The other will create a Built Works Registry through the use of a credentialed Wikipedia-like strategy.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2011

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References

1. ARTstor, a nonprofit organization, was founded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. As of September 2010, ARTstor provides software, services and 1.2 million images from over 190 source collections to over 1300 subscribing institutions, and is developing (in partnership with colleges, universities and scholarly societies) a networked cataloging and image management system (called ‘Shared Shelf).Google Scholar
2. Each record includes this statement: ‘Descriptive data, especially artist attribution(s), may have changed since the descriptive data was collected by the Gernsheim Corpus. For more current scholarly opinion, ARTstor users are encouraged to consult the scholarly literature and especially the owning repository’s publications and website.’Google Scholar
3. We would also seek to make these links and comments compliant with a new emerging standard being developed by the ‘Open annotation’ project. This effort seeks ‘to facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections’. By having user-added links and comments managed in a standards-driven way, we would have greater comfort that the investments made by individual contributors will live on as the content migrates (both within ARTstor and, potentially, outside ARTstor eventually as well).Google Scholar
4. Currently only six institutions have complete sets of the Gernsheim photographs, drastically limiting the possible discussion of the drawings within the scholarly community. With our release of the collection and bibliography/discussion tools within the ARTstor digital library, our 1300 subscribing institutions would have immediate access to both the full corpus of images and the scholarly discussion (an increase of more than 200 times or 20700 per cent of the number of institutions that have access today). At the same time, the contributing Gernsheim repositories would get access to the digital Gernsheim collection and the discussion that ensued around the works.Google Scholar
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9. Leadbeater, Charles, We-think; mass innovation, not mass production (London: Profile Books, 2008), 90.Google Scholar
10. In a similar way, many people often mistake the numbers in a spreadsheet for ‘facts’, and fail to question the source or the validity of the data reported or even whether the formula masked beneath a ‘total’ has added a column correctly.Google Scholar