Yunmeng Du Blog 3: Science and the Artist's Book

Collection Principles

I found this exhibition from Mosaic of Science Galaxy in Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Science and the Artist's Book is an exhibition presented by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts. This exhibition aims at exploring links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format. The two host institutions invited a group of nationally recognized book artists to create new works of art based on classic volumes from the Heralds of Science collection of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, which serves as part of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries’ Special Collections.

Metadata

I don’t see any significant metadata in this collection. This collection doesn’t have any search function, as far as I see. All images are sorted by different scientific subject such as Aeronautics, Architecture, Biology, Physics, Medicine, etc. Each image is an illustration from a specific book, which presented under the respective image with the author, title, publication title, location, date and the description of the book. Since there is no search function in this exhibition, any information can only be browsed by users, which means you can only click through each image in order to access them.

Object Characteristics

The resulting artist's books in this collection, each inspired by the subject, theories or illustrations of the landmark works of science with which they are paired, offer a number of witty and imaginative insights into the creative side of scientific research. For example, under Architecture subject, there is one page with one image from a scientific book and the other one from the artist’s book. Full-size JEPGs and GIFs for each image are available and downloadable. However, the image on this page itself cannot be zoomed in or out. There are only two buttons at the bottom of the page—return to the previous section and return to the start of the exhibition. Otherwise, there is no way to navigate from this page to other pages of the collection. This is not a good example of providing online exhibitions to the public. The possible reason may be this is a small exhibition based on very limited collections.

Intended Audience

The intended audience is kind of vague for this exhibition. Since it contains illustrations from both scientific books and respective artist’s books, I assume that the intended audience is people from public who are interested in the illustrations of scientific books, or the professional artists illustrating scientific books.