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…]
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