Ostrow came here from a university that worked only with slides he was excited that the U was technologically way ahead of most institutions. “You can show an image more than once without needing multiple slides, and do wonderful things with images, like zooming in for details, or changing the color of the background,” he says. Steven Ostrow, department chair, finds it an extraordinary tool. The conversion to digital images and PowerPoint presentations has changed the way many art history faculty members teach. Moss and her VCR colleagues are also training graduate students to digitize and catalog images from 18 other College of Liberal Arts disciplines. And that’s something that might be of interest to a historian of science. For instance, clicking on the “more info” button for the Jan Gossaert portrait A Little Girl will allow users of the database to learn that the girl is holding an armillary sphere, an instrument used to depict planetary movement. With digital technology, much more information can be included.”Īfter scanning an image, Larson and Moss create a work record, which contains information about the specific work (title, date, location, etc.) an agent record, which gives general information about the artist including birth and death dates multiple views of the work from different angles comments by experts in the field and links to other relevant information. There is only so much information you can put on a slide label. “It’s very different from working with slides,” says Moss. So it needs a broad range of “entry points” and keywords such as “Realism,” “nudes,” “modern life,” “gender,” and “canvas paintings.” For instance, a popular painting like Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe may be sought out by diverse groups of users. Part of the challenge, Larson says, is identifying just the right terms for classifying images. Given that there are many ways to catalog the same object, it’s a very subjective business.” So we are cataloguing at a much greater depth. And whereas books come with titles, images come without any text. “There is no national classification system as there is in library science. “This is very new and more complicated than classifying books,” says Moss, who came to the VRC from Indiana University eight years ago. With conversion processes in place, a new challenge arose: cataloguing the images for a broad range of users. From his windowless office in the basement of Jones Hall, he researched emerging digital technologies, specifically the hardware and software necessary to capture, process, archive, and present images and video (in addition to slides, the VRC contains more than 200 films in a variety of formats). Wilkes was instrumental in the conversion from film-based photography to digital imaging. Their work is contributing to a rapidly expanding Digital Content Library, which is one of the largest university collections in the country. Over the past decade, VRC director Rebecca Moss, assistant curators Ginny Larson and Denne Wesolowski, and photography expert Ashley Wilkes have transformed more than 50,000 of the Department of Art History’s approximately 300,000 slides into high-resolution digital images.Īs visual resource professionals in a hot and relatively new field, they have devised a cataloguing system for art history images that is flexible, accurate, and accessible to even the most technologically inexperienced students and faculty members. The staff members of the U’s Visual Resources Center (VRC) often make things up as they go along. Visual Resources Center staff members, left to right, Ginny Larson, Rebecca Moss, Ashley Wilkes, and Denne Wesolowski.
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