The Fighting Tern Frederick Turner
The Good News
The recent news that “[t]he BBC is to put every one of the 200,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK on the internet,” as reported on January 28, 2009 by the Guardian, isn’t exactly about searching by subject, which is my subject, but it will lead there eventually. It is heartening news about the right of the public to access publicly owned works and the recognition of this right by the the United Kingdom. I should note here that this particular endeavor is only one of a number of related initiatives that the BBC has pledged will give it a “deeper commitment to arts and music,” including “opening up the Arts Council’s vast film archive online” among many others and that the article reports on these as well.
Curious, of course, about how subject matter access would be provided, and hoping for the best, I dug deeper. I was able to glean a little more information from the BBC Press Release which prompted the article. There I learned that the project is a partnership of the BBC with the Public Catalogue Foundation. The BBC describes the project as follows:
“it could enable the public to view every one of the UK’s 200,000 publicly-owned oil paintings, 80% of which are currently hidden away….The aim of the partnership is to establish a website on bbc.co.uk, called Your Paintings, where the public can view and find information on every oil painting in public ownership… The benefits to the public at large and the participating public collections will be substantial.”
I wanted to know more about what “view and find information” meant specifically. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
"subject matter cataloging",
Art,
BBC,
Bridgeman Art Library,
Public Catalogue Foundation,
United Kingdom,
Victoria and Albert Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art Exterior CC2 erin.kkr
General Description
The digital image collection available on the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a mixed bag. I refer, of course, not to the contents of the collection, but to the display and searchability of the subject matter of the works in the collection.
The Met’s description of the digital collection is as follows:
The Collection Database is a searchable database of artworks and related materials from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An individual database record includes information about an object as well as images, when available. The Museum’s curators have selected several works of note within the collection Database as Highlights of the collection. Due to the extremely large number of objects in the Museum’s permanent collection, not all artworks are currently available in the collection Database. Furthermore, information contained in the database records is, in some cases, incomplete, and all information is subject to change according to ongoing research and new acquisitions.
This statement acknowledges that not all objects in the permanent collection are contained in the database, and that those which are do not always have associated images, BUT it would have been nice for the Met to give the user some sense of proportionality. According to the site there are 128,347 items in the online collection. But I can’t tell form this what portion of the permanent collection this represents, The only piece of further information I can easily find is that the Highlights contain only 1407 objects. Equally important I can’t tell how many of the 128,347 objects have associated images. I can say, unfortunately, that it appears that the vast majority of the items don’t. One can browse the works to see page after page of thumbnails stating “image not available” What a drag. It is not a bad thing that so many objects lack images; better to have access to the text record than to have nothing at all. It is a major oversight, however, that the interface does not allow [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
controlled vocabulary,
Giotto,
Image search,
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City,
RFID,
rose,
Subject search
