Katie R: Artists of Brucke, blog 3

Artists of Brucke: Themes in German Expressionist Prints

The Museum of Modern Art created an online exhibition of their German Expressionist prints called Artists of Brucke.

Collection Principles:
This digital exhibit highlights the MoMA's collection of German Expressionist graphic art, organized into themes of Retreat, Christian Motifs, Cabaret, Nudes, and four others. The 120 works displayed in the exhibit are all prints by the main artists of the Brucke, or Bridge, movement in the early 20th Century. Because this exhibit is from the MoMA, has central themes, critical commentary, and extensive credits I would assume that the project was heavily curated and planned in detail.

Object Characteristics:
This exhibit was created in Flash not html, which presents several problems in terms of navigating and viewing the images. New smaller windows are always popping up when the user wants to know about chronology, credits, or a list of the artworks. When the user wants to view an image in detail, a "Return" button is the only way back to the previous page since there is no navigation bar. Users (such a me) might be tempted to close out of the new window, since other information creates a new box. This will close out the whole exhibit. The prints themselves are only presented in Flash, making any copying of the MoMA's images impossible. This seems a little overprotective, since the population who is interested in making a rough woodcut of a naked dancer might be rather small. The website also has a voice-over, as an exhibition guide, that is relatively surprising when he first talks. This audio portion takes time to load, as does the Flash.

Metadata:
The information included with each image is detailed, and includes the basics (title, artist, year, size) as well as the edition number and publisher/printer. Also prominently displayed is the copyright information. All these details make searching interesting, as the curaters have enabled a page of the site to be a visual experience, with thumbnails of all the prints highlighted when certain artists or mediums are chosen. Scrolling over an image annoyingly enlarges it when perhaps you didn't intend to click on that one. The images must be tagged behind the scenes in order to be searched by themes.

Intended Audience:
This site can only be viewed by users at a computer with a Flash plug-in. In order to hear the voice-over information, one cannot be at a public computer without headphones. The images are very nicely digitized, and the information included is brief but concise. This exhibit could excite a student about the artistic movement or be enough to satisfy a websurfer. The MoMA probably uses this exhibit as an example of their commitment to outreach.

Jesse Saunders #3: Somewhere a Voice is Calling

Somewhere a Voice is Calling: American Irish Interpreters, 1850-1975.

This exhibit was curated and posted by the O'Neill Library, one of the libraries at Boston College. The O'Neill Library is focused on primarily on collections related to Government Documents and Media materials. The library hosts a permanent exhibit honoring Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill Jr., former MA Speaker of the House and BC Alum, as well as temporary exhibits based on materials in the library's collection. The "Somewhere a Voice is Calling: American Irish Musical Interpreters, 1850-1975" exhibit was on display from July-October, 2007. This web exhibit served as an "Online Supplement" to the physical exhibit, of which no other information exists on the library website.

Selection Decisions:
There is no clear information given regarding how selection decisions were made as to what information and materials were included in the online exhibition. Surely the online exhibit was built to work within the context of the physical exhibit in the library, yet with no other information or media (images/video) of what was included, we cannot know how the two worked together and what was pulled from or added to in order to build the online exhibit.


Metadata:
On the pages which contain the photographs and audio clips, there is no metadata given, other than names and song titles. However, on the final "Credits" page, a list of image/photo information, which includes details about those included in the images, when/where they were taken, and who holds the original physical photographs. There are no details given about when/how the scans were done. This page also contains a link to a .pdf document which gives the standard bibliographic citation information for the exhibits audio clips. As with the images, there is no information about when or how the digital transfers were done, yet in the case of the audio there is not even any information on whose copies of the recordings were used for the audio transfers.

Object Characteristics:
Image files are primarily locally hosted .jpg files, with the exception of The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem album cover, which is linked to on wikimedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ClancyBrothersFirstHurrah.jpg. Other than that of The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem images are quite small, and there are no options to either view or download larger versions. The audio clips are presented in Real Audio format, requiring users to have the Real Player software installed on their computers, and not allowing users to download the clips.

Intended Audience:
As this is listed as an "Online Supplement" to the physical exhibit, the intended audience is clearly people who either already had, or were planning to visit the exhibit. Given the lack of context or further information given about the materials in the physical exhibit, the O'Neill Library has made it difficult for the online exhibit to stand on it's own and provide a full, enriching experience. While it contains some good information, it leaves someone new to the exhibit to go and look for something more on the topic.

Tami Blog 3: November 22, 1963 and Beyond

November 22, 1963 and Beyond

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library has an online exhibition showcasing some of the materials in their collection pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The LBJ Library, established in 1971, preserves and maintains for research the papers and memorabilia of President Johnson. However, the library’s holdings also include materials from Johnson’s entire public career, as well as materials related to his family and close associates. The library currently houses 40 million pages of historical documents. In addition, the library actively collects the papers of Johnson’s contemporaries and conducts an oral history program to supplement the written records contained in its collection.

Collection Principles

This exhibit contains photographs, audio transcripts, downloadable audio, copies of note cards prepared for public remarks, a transcript of his speech to Congress, diary excerpts, oral history interviews, and links to complementary or further information on the assassination. The home page of the exhibit is very simple and straightforward. A list is provided linking the user to sub-collections documenting Johnson’s activities on the day of and following the assassination. The extent and depth of information contained in the sub-collections is different for each. For example, the first link, entitled “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Daily Diary,” takes the user to a short text explaining how the president’s daily diary was created and by whom. It also provides information as to the abbreviations utilized in the diary. Below the text are links to the diary pages. In contrast, the third sub-collection, links to a single photograph.

Object Characteristics

All of the photographs in the collection are JPEGs and, once you’ve clicked on the thumbnail and opened the file, do not have the ability to click on the photo for further enlargement. (However, there are links in the metadata to enlarged TIF files.)The document scans, such as the diary pages, are PNG files and the note card is a GIF file. The note card can be enlarged by, again, clicking on a link to the right of the document. It would be nice to have larger, more detailed examples of the handwritten or hand-corrected documents because these are essentially useless at the size provided.

Metadata

Extremely good metadata is provided for each photograph, such as Image Number, Credit, Image Date, Event, Location, Description, Rights Information, and links to enlarged TIF files. No metadata is provided concerning the audio files, the note card, nor the diary pages.

Intended Audience

Useful for researchers and biographers would be the diary pages containing minute-by-minute evidence of Johnson’s activities directly before and after the assassination. In addition, the links to additional information could be utilized by students and teachers interested in presidential succession and the assassination, as a whole, not just Johnson’s part in it. The photographs, while providing much detail of the event, are more limited in context, pertaining almost wholly to Johnson’s swearing in ceremony, but would be useful to researchers in that regard.

Claire B. Blog 2: Alcohol, Temperance, & Prohibition at Brown University

The digitized items in the Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition Collection come from the Alcoholism and Addiction Studies Collection at Brown University. This collection includes over 15,000 items purchased by Charles Bishop, an antiquarian bookseller and researcher of Alcoholics Anonymous and related groups in the United States. These items, ranging from broadsides and sheet music to pamphlets and government publications, built onto Brown’s already large collection of items relating to the history of alcohol in the United States – its use, regulation, and media portrayals of the alcohol industry.

When Brown University acquired this particular collection, it initiated a project to digitize the pamphlets published by various groups leading up to prohibition, during the prohibition era, and ending with the 21st amendment in 1933, which repealed the 18th amendment from 1919 prohibiting the manufacturing, sale or transportation of alcohol.

Collection Principles

The Center for Digital Initiatives at Brown selected these pamphlets in particular because they offered visually-rich, easily accessible scans, represented a manageable segment of an enormous collection, and, importantly, they are all in the public domain, which makes this project much more easy to carry out from a copyright perspective.

Object Characteristics

The pamphlets were scanned page by page and are viewed as low and high resolution jpeg images. Archival copies were saved as TIF files. Whether searching or browsing, thumbnail images lead viewers to numerous options: viewing the images themselves (thumbnails plus a low and high res jpeg for each image), an item description (which provides a minimal amount of metadata), thumbnails of the entire pamphlet side by side (if it consists of more than one page), and a document map, which offers URLs or filenames for any file that the object is related to (e.g., for the TIF file, each jpeg, and for the metadata record itself in XML).

Metadata

Each image provides a list of basic metadata, including title, publication/creation, creators and contributors, description, subject headings (assumedly LC), and the host collection (although most of these elements simply link the viewer back to the website for the original collection, as opposed to giving a location within the library system. These items are searchable in Brown’s OPAC, though, so this can be gotten around). Each image also provides a link to a document map, though, which offers access to the entire metadata record in XML (see an example here).

The CDI home page has a documentation section that provides much more in-depth information on the descriptive standards used (Metadata Object Description Schema, or MODS, for still images) plus the technical standards as well. The CDI works closely with the faculty and students who spearhead various digital initiatives, so this information is probably really useful in the planning and implementation processes.

The basic and advanced search functions work well, but the browsing is sort of clunky. The options - by creator, publisher, or title - each offer long pages of individual listings that sometimes overlap. The aimless viewer can all view all thumbnails, which comes with 20 pages to scroll through and explore.

Intended Audience

This portion of the larger collection seems geared towards researchers of United States history, of the arts and portrayals of the various perspectives on alcohol and its sale and consumption historically, and the relationship between visual arts and political movements. The site has an "essay" section with a lengthy discussion of the various forms in the collection, and some interesting commentary on the content of the posters and pamphlets and their historical context.

As a side note, the Center for Digital Initiatives has digitized some pretty cool stuff from various university collections. I'd recommend checking it out.

Lauren A Blog 3: Young Henry VIII Virtual Tour

The Young Henry VIII virtual exhibit was created by Hampton Court Palace as an online surrogate of a permanent exhibit in the palace's Wolsey rooms. The exhibit is part of a program to open up previously hidden areas of Hampton Court in celebration of the 500th anniversary of Great Harry's accession to the throne. The exhibition is set in restored palace rooms and includes historic paintings and hands-on displays. Hampton Court is owned by the British royal family, but is preserved and operated by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that also looks after the Tower of London.

Collection Principles

The online exhibition's goal seems to be to give website visitors an experience very close to that of the actual Young Henry exhibit on the palace tour. All rooms and exhibit objects are included, excepting audio-visual materials. The exhibition contrasts the well-known stories of the "fat, tyrannical" ruler (they use those exact words A LOT) with the young, dashing prince and king Henry VIII was while married to Katherine of Aragon and closely advised by Thomas Wolsey. Materials seem to have been selected based on their relationship to these three people and the first 20 years of Henry's reign.

Object Characteristics

The online tour consists of 8 flash pages, one for each room. The tour is linear; there is no going back to the previous room for another look. Each “room” is a 360-degree still image taken from a center point in the room. This allows the visitor to look at all the walls, as well as the ceiling and floor, but does not allow the visitor to change position. This causes problems as some materials are displayed on the floor below where the cameraperson was standing. Additionally, the visitor cannot change their vantage point or avoid the glare of lighting and windows on a painting by moving around the room. The viewer can, however, control the camera's movement and zoom in on objects. As the camera touches on important objects such as paintings, ceiling details and furniture in the room, information about the object's historic significance appears at the bottom of the screen. Paintings can be clicked to open up a digital image, thus avoiding glare or other distortions, but losing the experience of “being in” the palace. The individual images can be saved to a computer hard drive as JPEGs. In this separate window it is also possible to zoom into the objects further.

Metadata

Absolutely no information is given about the digital objects, this includes the flash tour and the digital photographs of the artwork. The artists’ names are listed, along with their birth and death dates and the work's title. A few paragraphs about the artwork's subject and history are also presented. There is no way to search the tour, digital images or image information.

Audience

The site seems geared mostly toward stirring up tourism at Hampton Court. As it states, “our ambition is to make the palace the place to come and learn about Henry VIII in 2009 – and beyond” (the italics are mine). Additionally, the site’s extremely slow loading time, even on my very fast broadband, indicates to me that it would not provide much access to the millions of people worldwide who will never make it to the actual palace. The digital tour is just that, a tour of the rooms, it does not attempt to be a digital collection, which is good, because it most certainly would not succeed.

Emily V. Blog 3 - The Soviet Archives Exhibit

Collection Principals

The Soviet Archives Exhibit is administered by the Library of Congress. This exhibit, which was also shown in Moscow shows documents that were formally considered government secrets. The goal of the exhibition is to illustrate the Soviet Unions foreign and domestic policies, as well as Soviet-American relations. The exhibition was co-created by the Library of Congress and the Russian Archival Committee. They note in the preface that "the documents that the Library of Congress has here chosen from the 500 made available from the Russian archives cover the entire range of Soviet history from the October Revolution of 1917 to the failed coup of August 1991. They include material from archives that had been key working files of the Communist rulers until August 1991: the archives of the Central Committee, the Presidential archive, and the KGB."

Object Characteristics
The online exhibit follows the "path" of the physical exhibit, going so far as to explain that the two sections of the exhibit are physically separated by floors. Part of taking the online tour involves clicking golden footprint arrows. The quality of the scanned images is not terribly good. There is no option to zoom past "actual size," which makes clarity a problem. There are excellent introductions written for each document exhibited, however they chose only one object to represent each section - with a collection of 500 this seems to be a shame.

Metadata
No metadata is given about the location, call number etc. of the exhibited documents. They do, however, have translations.

Intended Visitors
This exhibit seems oriented towards scholars, rather than the casual observer. Unfortunately, it wasn't until I had almost finished looking at the site that I realized that this site is from 1992, this explains many of the more disappointing aspects of the site - it is extremely unattractive.

Hannah Norton Blog 2: Digital Library of the Commons Image Collection

The Digital Library of the Commons is an initiative out of Indiana University that looks to bring together scholarship on commons or “aspect[s] of the relation between the physical resource and human institutions designed in the use and maintenance of that resource.” This includes such topics as agriculture, forestry, water resources, wildlife, and social organization. The Digital Library of the Commons provides free access to full-text articles, dissertations, and papers from the Indiana University and beyond. The Image Collection is a subsection of this digital library with images from commons-related research activities by Indiana University faculty and students.

Collection Principles
The collection currently consists of around 950 photographs taken by researchers in one particular program, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. They anticipate 4,000-5,000 images in total when all of the workshop’s available photographs are included, and further anticipate opening the collection up for self-publication of images by others in the field. As far as I can tell, there is little curation of this collection planned – it seems that they’re simply in the process of digitizing all of the photographs from the last 25 years taken in conjunction with this workshop. Their goal to is serve as a central repository for all types of commons-related images, and presumably as many of them as possible.

Object Characteristics
The objects in this collection are all photographs taken during research trips throughout the world. Based on the date range covered by the photographs (1989-2007), it seems likely that some of the more recent photographs may have been taken digitally while older photographs were most likely scanned from the original prints. There is no information on the website that directly addresses the process of digitization that these images went through, however. The images are of a sufficient size for the user to actually see their contents- when an image appears with its record it fills about half of the browser screen and if you click this image a slightly larger one appears in a separate window.

Metadata
The following types of metadata are available for each image: keywords related to the content, country, region, sector (this refers to the area of commons research to which the image applies), photographer, caption (basically a title), abstract (a one sentence description), date taken, holding agency, workshop ID (which appears to be a unique identifier for the image), and in some cases conference. The collection is browseable by many of these fields and an advanced search option allows for limiting by a combination of these fields. Information elsewhere on the Digital Library Commons website indicates that the site is runs on Eprints2, which is OAI compliant. Although it isn’t clear whether this applies to the image collection in particular, it does speak well for the collection managers’ interest in interoperability.

Intended Audience
The intended audience of the Digital Library of the Commons as a whole appears to be academics and other researchers involved in studying various aspects of commons. While the image collection could be of some use to this audience, at times it seems more like a travel-log than anything else. While many of the images do document concepts related to commons research, others, such as those that show the group of people who made a particular trip, could only be useful as a kind of nostalgic memento for the individuals involved in that research and perhaps the department at Indiana University as a whole.

Overall, I thought this digital collection was serviceable. “Commons” seems to be quite a broad topic, so there may be uses for the information in this image collection that aren’t apparent to me. Still, I think that the main flaw with the collection is a lack of clarity about what exactly these photos would be useful for in the context of scholarly research, which is what the rest of this digital initiative purports to be about.