About Ofness

The subject of Ofness is everything I can find about the challenge of retrieving digital images by subject matter.

Having long searched for images online by subject matter, and having experienced both elation and frustration in the process it was natural that I would delve into it more deeply while I pursued my Master’s in Library and Information Science.

Having found many interesting sources on this topic, both online and in actual books and journals not available online, during the course [I originally wrote "curse"] of my explorations, and having found no website that pulled all these resources together, it seemed like creating my own would be a good way to organize what I have learned, and might do someone else some good. Hopefully as time goes by the disparate threads of interest I follow will coalesce into a natural organization and others, more knowledgeable than I on this subject, will contribute their comments, thoughts, links, articles, etc.

Ofness refers to one of the two elements or ways of describing the subject matter of an image as first articulated by Irwin Panofsky. The other is Aboutness. More on this distinction later, but for now suffice it to say that Ofness should be easier to identify and is less subject to judgement.

It refers to the things, the objects depicted. (e.g. horse, man jar, table, sky, stream, television, etc,)

I can’t help being tickled by Panofsky’s name. It seems to refer itself to this subject which he helped to explore. All About (Pan) Ofness (of). I will have to seek out the meaning of the “sky.”

A partial and evolving list of topics that will be covered here include:

* CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art)
* TGM (Thesaurus of Graphic Materials)
* CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects)
* LC Categoris (Library of Congress)!
* Iconclass
* AAT (Art and Architecture Thesaurus)
* CBIR (content Based Image Retreival)
* Steve.museum
* Folksonomy
* Flickr
* Panofsky
* SKOS
* Illuminata ( A Proquest Product)
* VRA (Visual Resources Association)
* ARLIS (Art
* Dublin Core
* Photoshop
* Taxonomies
* ALIPR (Automatic Liguistic Indexing of Pictures)
* CLUE (Cluster Based Image Retrieval)
* SIMPLitcity (Semantics-Sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture Libraries)
* MINDat.org
* Memorynet.org
* Terrrgalleria.com
* DAM (Digital Asset Management)
* CONTENT dm
* MDID (
* Oxford University Press
* LUNA Insight
* Dspace
* VRA Core 4.0
* IRIS
* Extensis Portfolio
* Archivsion
* ARTStor
* IOS (internatiuonal Organization for Standardization)
* Chenault
* Garnier Thesaurus Iconographique
* AACR (Anglo American Cataloging Rules)
* V&A Subject Index for the Visual Arts
* Controlled Vocabularies
* Visual Image User Studies
* EAD
* VISION project (HW Wilson)
* Revised Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging
* Google Image Search
* CLiMB
* Union Catalog of Art Images
* WebSEEK
* CIMI (Computer Interchange of Museum Information
* Artcyclopedia
* DIAP (Digital Image Access Project)
* SASKIA Ltd
* Flamingo

I have learned a lot about the broader subject of image digitization, organization, and preservation, as well as the subject of providing access to images, through my subscription to the VRA listserv. I want to acknowledge this valuable source of ideas.

Tagged as: Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Digital asset management, Dublin Core, Libraries, Library and Information Science, Library of Congress, Library science, ofness, Technical Services, Visual Resources Association