Katie R - Blog 7 - Seeing is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration

This online exhibit, Seeing is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration, compliments a physical exhibition of the same name at the NYPL in 1999-2000. This website is apparently from 2001, although looks much nicer than some newer online collections. The exhibition is meant to highlight the scientific prints in NYPL's collection. Since printing processes enabled medical and scientific information to be distributed, these illustrations are important in the spread of knowledge.

Collection Principles:
My first reaction to this exhibit was that it was comprehensive with interesting illustrations, and that it placed a heavy emphasis on printing processes. Since I love printmaking, I was very excited to see this explication. And then I realized that basically was the exhibit. I was expecting the exhibit to focus more on a cultural aspect, such as how the advances in printing led to the spread of medical knowledge, etc. Not so much. However, the succinct descriptions of printing processes and a small bit of its history did warm my heart. I think the physical show included more items from the NYPL's collection than the online exhibit (I should hope so, anyway). The exhibit was curated by two rare book and manuscript librarians, who I'm assuming knew the collection very well an chose the best examples of relief, intaglio, lithographic, and photographic illustrations.

Object Characteristics:
The images are jpegs. If you access the images through their respective process using the top menu bar, you can just enlarge the item into a new window. If you access the images through the Illustrative Processes page, then the site gives the option of clicking on an area of the image and seeing a close-up of that section, called Detail Studies. When clicking around to different pages, many phrases are links, but I found they all just lead you in circles or down an avenue from which it is difficult to return. Not very handy. Nice features include Links and Suggested Readings. I have no idea if this site uses a particular data management system.

Metadata:
The information with each image is basic but complete, including the artist, title, year, print process, what collection it's from within the NYPL, and the digitial size (not physcial, interestingly) of the image. I don't think there is any exceptional 'behind the scenes' data, since there are no search options. There is a link to "more information about this image" with all images, which brings up a short paragraph about the artist, scientist, or work of art. This seems like it is from the placards from the physical exhibit. The link to the rights of reproduction is prominant on any page with an image.

Intended Audience:
This online exhibit might attract those interested in science, but it should ultimately be geared toward printmakers or those interested in rare books and prints. The scientific/medical aspect of the exhibit is so basic and historically limiting that it would probably not be of interest to an historian. The digital exhibit could be a platform for the library to highlight its rare collections, there for the public and researchers to see and browse without too much effort.