Jesse Saunders #5: Lawrence University | Art of the Poster 1880-1918

Lawrence University | Art of the Poster 1880-1918


This collection of poster art is hosted by Lawrence University of Appleton WI, however the originals were collected and scanned by the Minneapolis College of Art & Deisgn of Minneapolis, MN. The artwork reflects the styles and themes during the "Golden Age of the Poster" (1880's through World War I), when zinc plates came into widespread usage and mass production of posters became common throughout Europe and the United States.

Selection Decisions:
Originally containing only sixty pieces, the initial collection was assembled to be used in the teaching of courses in Design History and Graphic Design courses at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. The posters in this collection were certainly chosen due to their dates of creation (1880-World War I), but throughout the collection, a range of styles and national trends are included. The current collection contains over 160 digitized posters.

Metadata:
Through CONTENTdm, a good amount of metadata has been collected including: the artists name, country of origin, and lifespan; year produced, original material, size, type (poster/advertisement), style, period, rights information, and identifier. The metadata is not strictly uniform in how it is applied though, as some poster's subject sections include translations of the text or short descriptions of the product/venue, while many have only transcriptions of the poster text. Overall the metadata is quite helpful, particularly in identifying the artists, countries of origin, and styles for those who are new to the art included in the collection.

Object Characteristics:
As stated in the introduction, this collection is managed and displayed with CONTENTdm. The search page can give false results, as it defaults to including items from other collections, however, these can be easily de-selected once the user makes a search and sees that here are returned results that are clearly not what they were looking for. Within the website viewer, the tif images are displayed, and can be zoomed in up to 100%. High resolution jpeg images can also be exported at 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%, via the export link at the bottom of the screen. This link, while not hidden, is placed as only a text link at the bottom of the screen, and not with the other image manipulation tools at the top of the window. Information about the processes and equipment used to create the scans is unavailable, as the About page contains only CONTENTdm's default "what information to place here" jargon.

Intended Audience:
As these were initally collected for art students at MCAD, this group remains it's primary audience base. The collection would be useful, to those who are interested in poster art of this period, particularly due to high quality downloadable scans. That being said, you would need to either know the collection was on the Lawrence website or commit to serious research to find it, as I could not find the collection using several different combinations of search terms in Google.