Visual Arts Forum Working Groups

Working Group meetings

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.

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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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