Yunmeng Du Blog 4:Asian Ethnographic Collection

I found Asian Ethnographic Collectionthrough the National Science Digital Library. This collection is part of the online collections supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which encompass digital images of artifacts, documents, and photographs.

Collection Principles

Asian Ethnographic Collection contains 44,598 objects with images and 49,624 images in total. From 1897 through 1902, Berthold Laufer, Waldemar Jochelson, and Waldemar Bogoras launched a collection of more than 15,000 objects from Siberia and China. In recent years, a host of objects from Vietnam have been added to this collection resulting from curator Laurel Kendall’s fieldwork in the ethnic groups of that country.

Metadata

Metadata has been assigned to every object such as catalog number, culture, country, material, dimensions and a short description of the object as the object name. The search function for this collection is very powerful. On the left hand of the homepage, users can do a free-text search within each field of metadata. Such fields include object name, material, locale, catalog number, accession number and donor name. There are more limiters like country and culture under the search box. You have six options to sort the results. On the center of the page is the image in gallery view with another search box at the bottom of the page, which allows users to refine the search. Each search box is followed by either brief search tips or a link to help.

Object Characteristics

16 images are displayed on each page in gallery view. They are grouped by different catalog number, the default index setting. The original setting for presenting images is gallery style, which means users can only see thumbnails and names once they conduct a search. But there is an “information view” link at the bottom of the page in order to let users view more descriptions of each image. A “print page” button also placed along with the information view so you can easily print out something from this page. When you click through each object, you can always go back to the original catalog page by clicking on the link above each image. This is another display option to let you view objects with nearby catalog numbers. No button or link can you use to go back to your previous page. However, since each image page is opened automatically in a separate window or tab, you will always have the homepage opened in a window or a tab. There is no zoom in/out function for this collection.

Intended Audience

This collection is launched by the Division of Anthropology at American Museum of Natural History. According to its mission statement, this collection can provide a window into the lives of the people who produced them, and they are resources answering those questions about the human experience. I would say this collection can be attractive to students or faculty who are doing research on anthropology, or to those who feel interested in human lives in a particular area.