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
Art Slide Drawer Photo Credit: Night Owl City CC2.0
Ancient History
Prior to the development of digitization techniques and the internet, image collections, typically slides, were organized by individuals who used the slides for teaching, or by individual holding institutions, often in unique or idiosyncratic ways. The systems for organizing these slides were relatively simple and had limited access points. While there were common elements, there were many differences, both in the character and depth of the organization.
Recent History
Since digitization of images emerged radical changes have occurred. Many associations involved in this areas, of professionals who handle these collections, of institutions who house them (including colleges, universities, museums, and archives), and of researchers who use them, turned their attention to the ways that digitization can be harnessed. Individually and collectively they have developed planning procedures for large-scale conversion of analog images to digital format, systems for organizing and managing these images, websites for sharing them, and protocols for exchanging metadata. There are a host of open source and proprietary tools supporting these many efforts.
The ability to actually retrieve and use these heritage images ultimately depends on metadata. Andrew Wray put it well when he said that metadata is [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Image search,
Library and Information Science,
Metadata,
Open source,
slides,
XML
How it works
Artigo is another site that, like Labelme, Peekaboo, and steve.museum, is geared toward using the collective intelligence of internet users to gather data that will improve image search functionality. Artigo is most like steve.museum in being semantically oriented. As at steve.museum, you provide your own tags for the image that is presented. Artigo’s image database contains 15,000 images and is set up at the University of Munich. But there are several refinements that make Artigo game-like, and arguably more effective in obtaining valid results.
Artigo - Mid Game
Each game session is timed; the players have 5 minutes. The number of pictures reviewed is a function of how quickly the players agree to move on to the next one. Generally you see 5-7 images per game. There are TABOO words, ones that have already been associated with the image. These appear below the image in RED. Players must dig deeper to find appropriate tags.
The more taboo words there are for an image the more points you earn for the tags you provide. Most importantly your tag is accepted only if you and your partner have both provided it, thus weeding out the chaff.
As you play a countdown of the seconds remaining appears at the top, and your points up to that point on the bottom right. You can see how many words your partner has selected, they appear as BLUE dots on the left, but not what they are. But when the game is over, each image is shown again with artist, title and date identified.
You also see the tags given by your partner and yourself, and any that agree are shown in YELLOW. They are the ones that you get credit for. Of course you get your final score as well.
Artigo also offers a monetary inducement to play. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Collective intelligence,
ESP Game,
Image search,
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich,
Luis von Ahn
