Stumbled upon the IMA in one of our readings for this week. I got a huge kick reading the descriptive tags added by visitors in the sub-section on Contemporary art. Is it weird that I'm more interested in how people are talk about an object than the object itself?
Collection Principles
The IMA seems to be a "general" art museum in the strictest sense of the word. Their collections span the globe and cut across time, with the only stipulation being that the collected works serve "the creative interests" of the museum's communities. It is unclear why certain pieces were picked as representative samples for their categories, beyond being of that time, region, or style. I'm always frustrated by broad headings such as "Asian art." Can't they drill down just a little bit?
Copyright is explicitly stated for each piece of art.
Although the IMA allows tagging, they enforce it with a captcha. In my eyes, that's an impediment to use. Like DRM, the people who want to break it will, leaving the casual users struggling to decipher and type words they can barely see. I would encourage more tags, not less, by not using captchas.
Object Characteristics
The website allows one level of zoom on all of their jpgs, and all of these larger images have an IMA watermark. Dragging and copying a jpg to the desktop reveals the file name, which is a long string of alpha-numeric characters separated by dashes. (It's meaningless to me, but perhaps on their end each chunk of the name subscribes to a naming convention they've developed.) Within the administrative metadata there is a direct link to where the image is stored on the IMA's servers.
Metadata
The descriptive and structural metadata is exceptionally strong, detailing the artist, artist nationality, artist birth-date, creation date, materials, dimensions, credit line, accession number, copyright, the wall label (nice touch!), and my favorite, user tags. At this point I'm not sure how useful the tags are - the tags 'hmmmm' and 'doodle' don't exactly inspire confidence -but that's a problem that can be worked out with scale.
Intended Audience
I'm a sucker for most contemporary art, but surely the site also draws visitors in with its Japanese, African, Neo-Impressionist, American Impressionist, and local Indiana art, among other collections. None of the digital collections are particularly extensive though, contrary to their 50,000 physical collection, and maybe that's the point. If the goal is to get bodies through the door (hello $12 tickets!), I can understand the appeal of a handful of teaser exhibits.
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