Digital Images and Art Libraries in the Twenty‐First Century

Citation

Inês Cordeiro, M. (2005), "Digital Images and Art Libraries in the Twenty‐First Century", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 2, pp. 309-312. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510585269

Digitisation projects and issues arising from the integration of image in library services have been at the forefront of concerns for art libraries and visual resource centres for some years. As explained by the editor in the Introduction, early enthusiastic predictions about the speed of making local collections globally available, especially those that are unique, have been giving way to a more realistic perception of what such undertakings entail. By offering a collection of articles by professionals who describe practical experiences, this book provides unveils the issues from the field. The book addresses a variety of aspects mainly related to the management of access and delivery services. That is to say, the focus is not on technical imaging issues or standards, but on strategies to administrate projects and on reviewing experiences of delivery.

While the volume does not show an explicit thematic structure, the organisation of the 11 articles appears to follow the intention of first exemplifying the diversity of materials forming visual resource collections that are good candidates for digitisation projects: photographs (Austin), architectural archives (Koskinen), slide collections (Pitt, Updike and Guthrie), and artists' files (Wilson and Dowell). Collaboration at a significant scale seems to be the following concern, well illustrated with the OhioLINK Digital Media Center (Bauer and Carlin) and ARTstor (Marmor) projects. The remaining articles are reflections on specific aspects of service delivery: ethical implications of WWW filtering (Bissonnette), the role and limitations of surrogates in art museum web sites (Taylor), the need for enhanced knowledge of image seeking behaviour of web users (Pisciotta), and issues of quality and integration of image access services with OPACs (Murphy). The book closes with a paper on the evolution of and current changes in “art librarianship” (Lucker).

In “CITY2000: a holistic approach to administering image resources”, David Austin presents the general strategy, at the preparation stage, for making publicly available in digital form an impressive collection of photos and audio and videotapes representing life in Chicago during the year 2000 (see www.uic.edu/depts/lib/resources/city2000/). The article gives an idea of the diversity of concerns, of the technical teams, of funding and time frames for such an undertaking. “Architectural archives: to web or not to web”, by Susan Koskinen, features two collaborative projects on architectural archives. One is the online collective inventory of the works by Charles and Henry Greene (see http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/architecture/greeneandgreene/index.html) built upon materials held in four different institutions. The second is the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project (see www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/), gathering historical, biographical, bibliographic and image resources related to Philadelphia architecture, architects and firms. While these projects are focused on converting past, analogue materials, the author raises the question about the future archive and preservation of the digital‐born documentation resulting from currently produced architectural works.

The digital use of slide collections is addressed by a group of specialists in visual resources and learning technologies in “Integrating digital images into the art and art history curriculum”. The main focus is on the functionalities that enable digital image databases to be used as tools for learning and teaching, with reference to the case of the Madison Digital Image Database. Artists' files are among the most valuable research resources compiled by art libraries from a wide range of ephemeral materials that are otherwise scattered and difficult to reach. In “Today's ephemera, tomorrow's historical documentation: access options for artists files”, Wilson and Dowell explain the nature, collection building, technical processing and accessibility strategies for these files, the uniqueness of which make them a priority for digital access.

“ArtSTOR: a digital library for the History of Art”[1], by Max Marmor, is an introduction to the objectives, prospects of content development and functionalities of the digital library of art images launched in 2001 by the A.W. Mellon Foundation (see www.artstor.org/info/). Another collaborative project is presented in more detail by C. Bauer and J. Carlin in “The case for collaboration: the OhioLINK Digital Media Center”. They explain the centralised model for resource access and management of this multi‐institutional service, underlining the functions of the Digital Media Center (see http://dmc.ohiolink.edu/) and providing the case of the University of Cincinatti Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning Library as a participant.

“Smothering free speech: filtering the world wide web”, by Susan T. Bissonnette, discusses filtering software tools, notably their motivations and efficacy. Above all, she questions the ethics of their use in libraries. The topic is interesting and current, yet not an issue that is particular or even very relevant to research libraries, and the article appears somewhat misplaced in this volume, as it is not especially developed regarding the retrieval of art images. Bradley Taylor's article “Enhancing the value of museum Web sites: lessons learned from the practical engagement front”, gives an interesting account of the debate over the usage of art surrogates and their limitations for education. Beyond emphasizing that digital representations of art works are trickier than for text‐based materials, the article suggests that museum web sites should target good activity content directed to capture audiences for the actual museums rather than concentrating in the provision of digital replications of their collections.

“Image delivery and the critical masses”, by Henry Pisciotta, explores the concept of “critical mass” to address the question of the exponential growth in images available on the web versus its value. The topic is also connected to the changes that web search services have been effecting in user search behaviours (notably more browsing and less querying), and the implications of this for the design of library image services. Another perspective of service design is offered by James L. Murphy, in “Link it or lump it: basic access strategies for digital art representation”. He points out the lack of a “clear‐cut plan or design” that is usual in the provision of library access services for electronic resources, especially the lack of integration with library OPACs. What is underlined by Murphy is the need for quality access, not just quality of content or of digital reproductions. Among other aspects, this lack of integration with OPACs, or the simple merging with other external databases that are produced by a variety of sources, often displays all the disadvantages of no vocabulary control and authority control functions.

The final article is “Evolution of a profession: the changing nature of art librarianship”, by Amy Lucker. She identifies some stable elements in the evolution of the profession but also new economic pressures that affect the sustainability of services while demands and expectations are higher in ever broadening areas such as art history. These new demands grow at the rapid pace of the change in educational environments and in the technology that enables the digitisation and sharing of online visual resources. According to Lucker, along with absorbing the technology, major changes for the profession derive from the need to work towards collaboration in the conception of image information systems, notably in agreed standards to enable sharing of data, an aspect that, unlike the field of textual materials, has not been a tradition for visual resources.

This book is a useful collection of experiences that can inform and inspire several professional communities – of art libraries, museums and visual resources centres in educational settings – despite the emphasis of the title on art librarianship. While the book itself seems to be a sign of (healthy) convergence trends, in practice one cannot refer to its content as that of a single “profession”. On the other hand the title is loose enough to create wide expectations. A subtitle expressing the focus on access issues and user services would have been useful, as the general subject of digital images in the art field covers a lot more of technical ground. From the perspective of access services, however, two topics could have been included that would have advanced the coverage of the book: image retrieval facilities in specialised or general purpose web search engines[2], as they cannot be ignored by art reference services; and the prospects of image retrieval based on algorithmic analysis of image files, already starting to be used as a complement to text‐based (i.e. metadata‐based) image indexing[3].

On the overall, this is a book recommendable for any information professional shelf. But a clearer structure and focus are the main missing points that make it difficult to consider this book “an essential primer” (as claimed in the back cover). A final word of advice to readers interested in the various projects described in the volume: it is worth visiting the respective web sites for current information, as some appear to be at stages more advanced than explained in the articles.

Notes

Comprehensive overviews of the development of visual information retrieval and access tools, encompassing the conceptual and technological levels are provided by Sandore (1999) and Del Bimbo (1999). The complementary approach based on image file analysis is called “content‐based image retrieval” (CBIR) and has been extensively researched (see Venters and Cooper, 2000; Veltkamp and Tanase, 2002). An example of the application of CBIR to art images is provided by the Artist Project (see Addis et al., 2002). Trant (2004) provides a recent study on benchmarking image retrieval services, comprising both metadata and content‐based systems. The study includes an extensive literature review as well as listings of metadata standards, projects, conferences and societies, and databases related to image retrieval.