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Digitisation Working
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Indexes and Databases Working
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Digitisation Working Group
Purpose The Visual Arts Forum held in May
2004 recommended that "ARLIS/ANZ and the National Library work together on
establishing a working group to address the issues outlined in the papers on
digitisation presented at the Forum. Issues include metadata, technical
standards, rights management, shared effort, and educational uses of digitised
images. The working group should aim to report on these issues by May
2005."
A Digitisation Working Group meeting was held at the National
Library of Australia on 29 October 2004. Attendees: Jill More
(COFA), Margaret Blackmore (COFA), Neil Hinsch (COFA), Joye Volker (ANU), Roger
Butler (NGA), Chris Foster (NLA) Chairperson: Cathy Pilgrim (NLA)
Summary of meeting
The introductory session opened with the main issues for this
Working Group confirmed as investigating avenues for bringing together and/or
providing a place for Australian artists to make their works available via the
web; and the general support that could be provided to visual arts
organisations to digitise and make their collections available online.
Discussion was held regarding the current avenues that provide
access to visual arts images such as PANDORA, PictureAustralia, NAVA, VISCOPY
as well as individual artist's websites. Of concern was that there is not
generally constant access to a representation of an artist's work. For example,
gallery websites display images of works for sale but they are then removed and
become inaccessible once the work has been sold or the gallery's collection
changed.
Neil Hinsch, undertook some background work to discuss with
artists why their individual websites were not represented in the Artists
Gallery through the NAVA visualarts website. Reasons included:
- Artists make their digital images available through the
galleries they exhibit in instead;
- Artists do not have the time or technical expertise to develop
and maintain their individual websites;
- Would prefer images of their works to be displayed through a
common portal.
Other issues identified were that copyright relating to digital
images of works was not a big issues for artists, however ensuring access to
these images was; fragmentation of images of artists works (images spread
across many different websites) was seen as problematic and many images are
publicly accessible for only a short time (removed from a gallery's website
when the work has been sold).
The idea of developing a standard template for artists to use with
standard image size and metadata was discussed. It was agreed to investigate
further the template model currently used for PictureAustralia. However the
responsibility for who should host these images and associated metadata was not
resolved.
Margaret Phillips, Manager of the National Library's PANDORA
service spoke to the Group in regard to visual arts websites that are being
archived in PANDORA for permanent retention. It was acknowledged that it is not
feasible for PANDORA to archive every visuals arts website; however significant
sites should be represented. It was agreed that visual arts organisations are
best placed to advise PANDORA on the most appropriate websites to be archived.
ACTION: Working Group representatives to liaise with the
visual arts community in order to recommend important individual artists
websites that would be suitable for inclusion in PANDORA. These recommendations
to be referred to PANDORA for selection decisions.
Elise Edmonds, Manager of the PictureAustralia service joined the
meeting to discuss ways in which the visual arts can be better represented in
PictureAustralia and to seek suggestions on institutions and collections that
should be targeted for inclusion.
Discussion also ensued on the metadata used within
PictureAustralia. Elise reported that Dublin Core was the standard metadata
schema for PictureAustralia, however very few elements were mandatory (title,
identifier, rights). Elise also advised that the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus
was recommended for describing pictorial format items included in
PictureAustralia.
The issue of a standard statement to support use of
PictureAustralia images for educational/classroom use was also raised. Elise
advised that this issue was to be discussed further at the PictureAustralia
Participant's meeting in November 2004. ACTION: Cathy
Pilgrim to report back to the Working Group the outcome of discussions relating
to use of images on PictureAustralia for educational/classroom use at the
PictureAustralia Participant's meeting in November 2004.
Report back on PictureAustralia Participant discussions is as
follows, "Derek Whitehead from Swinburne University of Technology led a
discussion at the PictureAustralia participants meeting on "Permissions and
Pictures", outlining the several ways in which owners of copyright in images
can protect their rights, but also provide explicitly for fair use. Examples
are the Creative Commons and Free for Education licences. Derek led a general
discussion on rights statements. As a result PictureAustralia staff and
participants will continue to investigate the issue of rights management
statements and free use of images for education purposes over the next 12
months and will report back to the Visual Arts Working Group developments on
any agreed statement." ACTION: Jill More and Joye Volker
to advise Elise Edmonds of the appropriate contact from their respective
institutions to discuss participation of these institutions in
PictureAustralia. ACTION: Elise Edmonds to advise the
Working Group what organisations are being targeted for PictureAustralia
participation over the next twelve months.
This list is fairly lengthy, however some of the institutions to
be targeted that may be of interest to the visual arts community include:
- State Library of WA
- Art Gallery of New South Wales
- Monash University
- Deakin University
- Macquarie University
- University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts
- Griffith University, Queensland College of Art Library
- Melbourne University, Ian Potter Museum of Art
- Newcastle Art Gallery
- Tasmanian Museum and Gallery
- Art Gallery of South Australia
- Queensland Art Gallery
- La Trobe Regional Gallery
- Bundanon Trust
- Dobell House
The sharing of purchased/licensed visual arts image collections
across educational institutions was discussed, however it was agreed that
copyright and general licence agreements do not allow for this.
The development of technical guidelines and implementation of
standards was seen as an important area to progress for visual arts
organisations that are digitising collections. Generally each institution has
its own imperative for digitising and one standard cannot be applied overall
eg. some institutions are digitising from surrogates not originals, some
institutions require small, JPEG files for easy delivery while others require
high resolution digital masters for viewing of fine detail. There was also
acknowledgement that a sliding scale of metadata requirements suitable for a
range of institutions would be appropriate. ACTION: Neil
Hinsch and Joye Volker to collaborate to develop a 'sliding scale' set of
metadata guidelines that can be used by a range of institutions.
It was also agreed that a section of the ARLIS/ANZ website could
be developed to include relevant information about digitisation activities and
standards as well as guidelines for institutions and individual artists on how
to and the benefits of, managing their digital content. Case studies and
digitisation experiences from a range of organisations could also be included.
ACTION: All Working Group members to consider appropriate
resources relating to digitisation that could be included on the ARLIS/ANZ
website. ACTION: Joye Volker to investigate setting up a
digitisation section within the ARLIS/ANZ website. ACTION:
Cathy Pilgrim to report back on development of a document by the National
Library providing guidance to small institutions on digitisation, which is to
be developed for the 2005 Community
Heritage Grants program.
Advice from the Community Heritage Grants program for 2005 is that
small organisations are being advised to focus on collection preservation,
control, description and access issues before undertaking any digitisation
activities.
Further discussions were held on the role that NAVA should play in
being the main repository for visual arts digital images.
ACTION: Jill More to undertake discussions with NAVA on
this issue.
* * * * * *
Indexes and Databases Working
Group
Purpose The Visual Arts Forum held in May
2004 recommended that "ARLIS/ANZ and the National Library work together on
establishing a working group to address the issues outlined in the Indexing and
Databases paper presented at the Forum. Issues include sustainability,
coverage, retrospective conversion, discovery, availability. The feasibility of
creating a portal or gateway for Australian visual arts resources could also be
addressed by this working group. The working group should aim to report on
these issues by May 2005."
Attendees: Jill More (COFA), Margaret Blackmore (COFA), Kay
Truelove (AGNSW), Margaret Shaw (NGA), Vicki Marsh (NGA), Chris Foster (NLA).
Also present: Joye Volker (ANU), Neil Hinsch (COFA), Roger Butler (NGA), Cathy
Pilgrim (NLA).
Summary of meeting held 29 October 2004
Access and discovery Margaret Kennedy, Director (Acting)
joined the meeting to outline the recently released Guidelines for contributing
metadata to the NBD. She also informed the Working Group that draft Guidelines
for the description of non-book print resources in Visual Arts collections had
been circulated at the cataloguing workflow workshop held in association with
the ARLIS/ANZ conference in Sydney in September. The guidelines are on the
Kinetica website and comments are sought until 5 November.
- There was some interest in the web input form although there
was also some concern about how non-Kinetica libraries and non-library
organisations would make their resources known and accessible.
- Margaret Kennedy said she would look at contribution of
ephemera file records and use of the web input form.
- What types of resources? Examples included: NGA obituaries,
Artex database, AGNSW prizes databases, VSL has collection level records at the
folder level (eg. folder for each artist), lots of self-indexed
files/collections, through to databases maintained by individuals (eg. Roger
Butler's name authority file).
- There appeared to be little interest in conducting a survey of
the indexes and databases maintained within the visual arts sector.
- ALG is one source of information about visual arts libraries
and resources held. Margaret Kennedy noted the content was very out of date and
that to bring it up to date was a very important task for the Resource Sharing
Division. It would be integrated into Libraries Australia.
- The Working Group was keen to see improvements made to ALG
particularly being able to search across subject specialisations. The Group
suggested that a subset of ALG of visual arts related organisations would be of
interest.
- Jill More noted that she had asked organisations that had
previously been listed in Ariadne ARLIS/ANZ's online visual arts directory to
put information about themselves into ALG but the take up rate had been low.
Jill was keen to explore whether it would be possible to compile a simple
directory of information about art libraries and resources.
Portal/gateway Some examples of portals were
discussed including the Culture and recreation portal and the Western Australia
Cultural Portal. It was acknowledged that the ARLIS/ANZ website would be the
obvious place to build up a strong visual arts resources presence. It was
envisaged that links would be expanded and possibly renamed with headings
grouped into artists, images, discipline, commercial galleries, and arts
organisations. The potential audience would be researchers, students, curators,
librarians, artists and teachers. The group noted the need to revisit the
metadata so that information is picked up by search engines such as Google.
- The Working Group considered that a portal could bring
together links to resources, links to the national bibliographic database and
ALG for directory information. The maintenance issues involved were
acknowledged as an important consideration.
- Jill More undertook to talk with the ARLIS/ANZ Executive about
content for such a web page.
Technology options
- Finding low cost, effective software that could be used for
indexes and databases was regarded as an important outcome for the Working
Group. Margaret Blackmore and Roger Butler agreed to explore and discuss
technology options and report back to the Working Group.
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