Tag Archives: Kelly Smith

The Digital World of Art History

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Intern Alena Principato ’15 shares her experience at Princeton Art History conference

Alena

Alena Principato excited to attend the Digital World of Art History conference at Princeton University.

With plans to earn a Masters degree in Library and Information Science and pursue a career in academic librarianship after graduating from Lafayette, I was able to use my internship with Lafayette’s Visual Resources librarian Kelly Smith to learn more about the field.

As part of my internship I had the opportunity to attend a one-day conference at Princeton University titled “The Digital World of Art History.” The conference, organized by the Index of Christian Art and Princeton’s Visual Resources Collection and Department of Art and Archaeology, centered on the theme of “Standards and Their Application.”

Armed with enthusiasm for my first professional conference, I filed into McCormick Hall and prepared to learn about cutting edge digital art history projects along with dozens of other attendees. The agenda for the day consisted of a line-up of twelve speakers, ranging from librarians and academics to digital developers, and included professionals from various cultural institutions.

Some highlights from the presentations:

Christine Kuan, a representative of Artsy (artsy.net), kicked off the day with her presentation on Artsy, Technology, and the Power of Public Access. The mission of Artsy is to make art accessible to everyone through an online platform for discovering, learning about, and collecting art that is free to the public. The site features more than 100,000 high-resolution images of artworks.

The Art Genome Project, similar in concept to Pandora’s Music Genome Project, assigns specific values to characteristics of art and architecture—the “genes” of the artwork—and uses search algorithms to create associations between related artists and artworks. This system allows for what Kuan calls a “radial” process of searching, allowing users to discover new artists based on their preferences.

Dustin Wees and Margaret Smithglass presented for the Built Works Registry (BWR), an ongoing project “to create and develop a freely available registry and data resource for architectural works and the built environment.” The project is a collaboration between the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, ARTstor, and the Getty Research Institute. The BWR imports data about works from multiple sources and seeks to standardize the title, date, and location of each work as well as assign it a unique ID number.

 Set to launch this October, the BWR plans to eventually give its data to Getty to turn it into one of their authoritative databases. Resources like the BWR are important for standardizing the cataloging of visual resources by providing a controlled vocabulary to maintain consistency in cataloging across multiple institutions. In my experience cataloging with Shared Shelf, I’ve been using controlled vocabularies to assign subject tags to digitized prints produced by the Experimental Printmaking Institute. (Read more about this in my previous blog post.)

 Following the afternoon presentations was a reception inside the art museum, which provided a beautiful atmosphere for networking mixed with art appreciation. Overall, the conference was a great learning experience that expanded my understanding of the possibilities for digital projects involving visual resources collections and fueled my excitement about the direction in which the field is heading.

DSS is actively seeking students from across campus and across disciplines to participate in our internship program. With us you’ll learn hands-on skills in digital scholarship, computer programming, application design, and data preservation. You’ll earn work experience while learning from a professional team on the cutting edge of digital research. E-mail us with your name, major, area of expertise, and reason for applying at digital@lafayette.edu.

The Art of Cataloging

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Alena Principato ’15 discusses her Visual Resources Internship with DSS cataloging images from the Experimental Printmaking Institute

This summer I completed an internship under the guidance of Kelly Smith, Lafayette College’s Visual Resources Librarian. I have been learning about visual resources management and assisting Kelly with the digitization of the Experimental Printmaking Institute’s body of work. Each print that is digitized must be photographed, edited, and uploaded to Shared Shelf, a cloud-based cataloging and content management system developed by ARTstor.

What is cataloging and how does it work?
According to Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images, “to catalog a work is to describe what it is, who made it, where it was made, how it was made, the materials of which it was made, and what it is about.” This information is also referred to as metadata (essentially, “data about data”), especially when it is entered in a digital format.

Recording such data may seem straightforward, and often is; the name of the artist, the measurements of a work, and the date of creation are simple enough to ascertain. However, selecting the subject of the work is more ambiguous. As Shared Shelf explains, the subject field contains “terms that identify, describe, and/or interpret what is depicted in and by a work.”

Consider what it means to “interpret”—when a person views an art object, they draw conclusions about what it means, often through the lens of their unique background and personal experiences. A detail in a painting that captivates one person may be completely overlooked by another.

The challenge for a cataloger of a visual work is to consider all of these potential viewpoints. The cataloger must be observant and sort out what information about a work is relevant to include, and what elements are trivial or unnecessary to describe. It’s helpful to think of subject terms as the keywords used to conduct an image search. Catalogers have to anticipate future users’ research needs—which could be on a general subject or specific topic—and account for both when they are describing a work.

While there is no one standard governing the selection of subject tags, catalogers may choose subject terms from lists of pre-set subject identifiers known as controlled vocabularies. For cataloging the Experimental Printmaking Institute’s works, we selected four resources for subject terms: Getty’s Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) and Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Iconclass, and Library of Congress Subject Headings. Each helps standardize the cataloging of visual resources by providing a controlled vocabulary to minimize variations in cataloging by different institutions.

My process for subject tagging the EPI works begins with identifying general terms and narrowing down from there. First I evaluate the work for major concepts and overall themes. Once those are established, I take a closer look at details in the image that seem important, such as an identifiable person, place, or event. Details do not necessarily have to be a focus of the work as a whole to merit being included–if a tag could be useful in helping someone locate an image of a particular subject, it may be worth including. However, it’s not a good idea to tag details that are truly a minor or irrelevant part of the image, since this could result in overemphasizing their importance.

An Example
Here’s how I approached cataloging “Taxes on Us Without Our Consent,” a screen print by Faith Ringgold.

Ringgold

“Taxes On Us Without Our Consent,” from Declaration of Freedom and Independence by Faith Ringgold

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