Yunmeng Du Blog 2: Digital Arhive Services in Visual Resource Collection at UT Austin

Collection Principles

As slides are continued to be used in classroom teaching and the use of digital images is becoming rapidly the preferred format, The Visual Resources Collection has been producing high quality digital TIFF images since 2004. As of September 2008, circa 33,400 digital JPEG images are accessible via the Digital Archive SErvices (DASE https://dase.laits.utexas.edu ), a password protected site.

The VRC participated in the licensing of the Archivision (Art and Architecture) Collection and the Allan T. Kohl Archive. Both of these collections are accessible through DASE. In cooperation with the Blanton Museum, the VRC is in the process of making the museum's holdings digitally accessible on DASE for classroom teaching.

Metadata

The metadata they used for this particular collection is very impressive. The common fields have been employed, of course, compassing title, authors/works supported, period, location, serial number, original filename, original file checksum and some notes on the scratch pad. The coolest thing is that you can conduct a search by simply clicking through the content under each field. For instance, after an image in Renaissance has been retrieved. The word ”Renaissance”, which will be placed under the field “Period: British”, becomes an active link allowing you click through in order to get a list of everything shown in this collection containing the word “Renaissance”.

Object Characteristics

The Slide Collection, which began around 1940, currently numbers approximately 550,000 35mm analog slides of which circa 218,648 have been entered into a database. Currently, these text records are not available on-line. Electronic access to these text records is only possible in the VRC room. The Collection also houses the Ferguson Collection that consists of over 5000 photographs, negatives, and contact sheets of Mayan sites in Central America.

Each image goes with three display options: small, medium, large and full, which allows users zoom in/out. Another unique function for each exhibit is that two helpful website programming scripts have been elaborated. If a user wants to incorporate the image into a webpage, the easiest way is to copy and paste the scripts into the source codes of the webpage. Two types of scripts have been provided here as HTML and XML. On the page of each image, there are several navigation tabs on the right side. You can go back to your previous searches by clicking “Current Search Results”. This website is also allowing users to create their own collections and slideshows by clicking the “My Collections” and “My Slideshows” buttons on the navigation bar in order to form a list of your preferred images.

Intended Audience

As it’s been clearly stated on DASE’s homepage, the Visual Resources Collection (VRC) affiliated with Art and Art History Department of College of Fine Arts is a teaching resources unit for faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin. Its mission is to support the teaching needs of the Art and Art History Department.

Since a UT EID is a must to access this collection, I would say their intended audiences are UT faculty, students, staff or any other UT affiliated individuals or organizations.