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Museo del Prado

Ideal Access to Images

by Denise on May 6, 2008

Eden as depicted in the first or left panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch Image via Wikipedia

The potential usefulness of well cataloged images seems enormous. Images can open up avenues of thought and research previously unavailable, not just within the narrow category that the image may be typically associated with (whether that be art history, architecture, geology, or some other area) but across disciplines, and into wholly new areas. While cross disciplinary studies are not new, ready access to the whole store of images would greatly facilitate and stimulate further work by artists, economists, historians, and doctors, among others, independently and collaboratively. Leaving aside the myriad barriers posed by expense, expertise, technology, and legal considerations (including copyright), and the differing views about priorities and cost allocation, here is my attempt to articulate an ideal.

Universal, scalable, trustworthy, sustainable, and permanent access to all heritage digital images from the publicly accessible to the privately held, including those from all museums and cultural institutions, archives and libraries, private collections, and publishers, using a system of organization that maximizes entry points and interconnections between objects and relevant texts, to facilitate retrieval for all imaginable purposes, through interfaces which have the capability of searching across all platforms, providing high resolution images, thumbnail browsing, copying and reuse for non-commercial purposes, and links to contextual materials, with continuously updated information of the applicability of worldwide copyright status and contact information for obtaining permissions.

This ideal is more utopian than anything; this is what brought Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights to mind as a good illustration here. My utopian ideal does provides a context for looking at what exists, and what is evolving. If there could be agreement about the goal, however unrealistic at present, this could inform the current and developing practices at critical institutions.

Since first writing this piece, The Garden of Earthly Delights has become a prime example of a different aspect of ideal access to images. Google Earth chose to render this painting, along with 13 others at the Prado, in unimaginably high resolution. The detail below is of the face of the monkey that is sitting atop an elephant in the distance, about a third of the way from the top of the picture. In the thumbnail of the painting here, the monkey is barely detectable.

Garden of Earthly Delights - detail of moneky face

To view this painting in this way is truly breathtaking. Google’s accomplishment far exceeds my imagination; maybe the rest of the utopian dram described above is also possible.

I must unfortunately note the Museo del Prado’s non-existent subject search capability. While the collections page does say that search by subject is possible: “Access on line to approximately 2000 works of the Museum’s collection. …This data base will enlarge until it holds the complete collection….The advanced search engine facilitates consultation, using categories such as artist, title of work, subject, chronology and reference number…” in fact it is not. The advanced search has drop down boxes with NO options, and “subject” is not even one of them. On top of that, the word “Chronology” is misspelled. The Prado’s aspiration to digitize and share the entire collection is admirable, but image cataloging and search functionality should go hand and hand with the digitization. It is well known that once the digitization process is complete it is very rare for more metadata to be added at a later time.