Celebrity Caricature

The Smithsonian Institution Libraries has put on an exhibit titled "Celebrity Caricature." During the late '90s the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery Library made a concentrated effort to collect caricature and cartoon materials. Their holdings include issues of Vanity Fair (over 80 issues), the Raymond W. Smith Collection of Caricature and Cartoon Books (500 items). A small percentage is captured on-line. The digital gallery displays images by Al Hirschfeld, Miguel Covarrubias, some of their contemporaries, and works from Vanity Fair.

Collection Principles
The site begins with a page devoted to orienting the viewer on the collection. There is a link ("Enjoy the exhibition gallery") at the bottom of the page connecting the viewer to the gallery. There are 10 exhibtion gallery pages. Each page has a different image. The site has a section for credits and a section that suggests further reading. The section on credits gives background information realting to the rights of the materials.

Object Characteristics
The images are caricatures of various celebrities mainly captured during the mid 1900s. The site allows the viewer to enlarge the image.

Metadata
The exhibit provides thorough metadata. The Smithsonian includes the title (the celebrity), the artist, the date, the birth and death dates of the artist, the work's current location, the curator of the exhibit and the exhibit title. They also give a detailed description of each image.

Intended Audience
This is meant to be a fun exhibit. It would potentially attract people interested in art, design, fashion and celebrities as well as researchers studying caricature during the mid 1900s.

The Object of History : NMAH

The Object of History exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (created in partnership with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University) currently features only four objects, but I think it is an interesting example of an online exhibit. It demonstrates one way to create a deep "object" in a digital museum.

Collection Principles
The objects featured in the exhibit seem to be taken from a broad range of themes and times from American history. The project is free to the public. The intention of the exhibit is to offer a look at history using artifacts as a starting point and to focus on education about the curation of those artifacts.

Object Characteristics
Each "object" is centered around one physical artifact from the museum's collections. The objects could actually be called exhibits. Each object (or exhibit) has Introduction, Explore, Tour, and Resources sections. The Introduction consists of short, introductory text, an overview video that places the object in its historical context, and a QuickTime VR view of the artifact. The videos are kid-friendly, with a cartoony feel, and are a mashup of real video of the image, photographs, and text. The Explore section has three subsections: The Object, Object in History, and Object in Museum. These contain text, video, audio, and images related to the object itself. Object in Museum discusses issues central to the curation of the artifact. There are quite a few interviews with museum curators throughout the exhibits. The Tour section seems to include other, related objects and annotations. The Resources section contains links to related online exhibits with long annotations (a paragraph or more).

Metadata
Since this is more of a museum exhibit than a digital library, and since the audience seems to be younger students, there is less metadata available to the user than I would like. All media is annotated (I assume by museum curators, though they are not atrributed) and is accompanied by a source attribution below.

Audience
Younger students, teachers. From the About page, "the materials on the site are designed to improve students��� content knowledge of standard topics in U.S. History and to improve their ability to understand material culture objects as types of historical evidence." A secondary purpose is to provide a model for smaller museums and historical societies for creating online exhibits.

VADS: The online resource for visual arts: http://www.vads.ac.uk/:

VADS: The online resource for visual arts: http://www.vads.ac.uk/:

a. Selection decisions: Online access to over 100,000 visual arts images comprises this collection. According to the email I received from the ARLIS listserv, "The website has been developed by VADS (the Visual Arts Data Service) which re-branded and re-launched itself earlier this month and contains collections as diverse as the National Inventory of Continental European Paintings, the Woolmark Company Archive, and the Central Saint Martins Museum and Study Collection." VADS is based within the University College for the Creative Arts at Farnham. VADS is continuously adding to its catalogue and just this year has added a collection of photographs from the East End archival project which includes 500 images of the Spitalfields area from the 1970s to the 1990s - a period of rapid social and physical change; furniture from the Frederick Parker Chair Collection which demonstrate 350 years of British chair design and manufacture; as well as the archive of post-war British sculptor Peter King. Other collections available online through the site are 'Spanish Civil War Posters', 'Concise Art', and 'Posters of Conflict' all from the Imperial War Museum, and the Design Council Archives and Slide Collection from University of Brighton and Manchester Metropolitan University respectively.

b. Metadata: Each collection has an "info" tab, which takes you to an entire webpage of the history and context of the development of the collection. This page also gives contact information for details on rights, reproduction, etc., and image credits. Each of the images' copyrights are listed at the bottom, in thumbnail and zoomed-in format. In the smaller size, after one clicks on the linked title in the thumbnails section, the metadata gives the title, title larger entity (donor), Collection name, artist, date, location of the current repository (title of the repository), subject, measurements (in millimeters), and rights details. The metadata differs, however, depending on the collection. Sometimes the metadata will also include a description of the work (providing context), subject/keyword, measurements in centimeters, rights owner and rights status.

c. Characteristics of the objects (in the exhibition) and the exhibition as an object: At the very top, the viewer sees that there are four links: Collections, Resources, Services, and News. One can view by collection, by browsing images, or by searching broadly through an "image search" bar at the top. One can also choose to search through more search options, which takes the viewer to another webpage, where there is a link to an advanced search, links to the collections, a link to the image of the day, and a list of popular searches. One can also access one's lightbox from the search bar (see below). If one browses by collections, there are "info" and "images" tabs underneath a representative thumbnail of each collection (see above). When one clicks on the "info" tab, one is directed to a different webpage detailing the history and context of the collection, image rights, and contact information for reproduction and further details. If one follows the "images" tab, one is directed to a webpage of thumbnails, with a linked title under each. When the viewer clicks on the linked title, there is a larger image, and its metadata, with links to "Go to larger image," which zooms in (and then provides you with a "go back" tab) and an "add to lightbox" tab, which directs you to a page to sign in, or sign up for an account. I am assuming this is similar to ARTstor, which allows you to compile your images on its server in order to build a presentation. Under Resources, there is a series of external links for further art historical and art image repository websites, with a brief description of each underneath. Services lists their services offered, and news provides images and news blurbs on changes with VADS.

d. The intended audience: Students and academics. VADS has been providing services to the academic community for some 11 years and has built up an impressive portfolio of visual art collections. The image resources are free and copyright cleared for use in UK Higher and Further Education, providing a valuable resource to students and academics. In addition to providing and building on its online visual arts resource, VADS also offers expert guidance and help for digital projects in arts education. The expert VADS team also offers web development and hosting services for visual arts organisations and projects. As part of its commitment to visual arts education, the VADS team commissioned a lecturer from the Advertising and Brand Communication Course at the University College for the Creative Arts to work with students to develop the new VADS branding. The final branding designs that have been used on the website and in VADS publicity material were developed by second year Graphic Communication student Dan Mitchell.

NYPL: American Popular Song Sheet Covers, 1890-1922

American Popular Song Sheet Covers, 1890-1922

According to their website, the mission of The New York Public Library is to select, collect, preserve and make accessible "the accumulated wisdom of the world, without distinction as to income, religion, nationality, or other human condition." It offers broad public access to a wide range of historical and cultural documents that "enable individuals to pursue learning at their own personal levels of interest, preparation, ability and desire, and help ensure the free trade in ideas and the right of dissent."

Collection principles: This digital collection “presents the first decades of a comprehensive holding of popular American sheet music.” The original collection contains more than 400,000 titles and came to the Library in 1966 from the estate of George Goodwin. As the title states, the digital collection is composed of popular sheet music covers from dates ranging from 1890 to 1922. In the Sheet Music Covers section, there appears to be about 4348 different images in the collection currently.

Object characteristics: You can search the collection, browse it by year, or choose to “see all” and you will get 363 pages of song sheet covers sorted alphabetically to look through. The images come in three different low-resolution sizes: 72-dpi ‘derivative’ files are created for delivery on the web, at 150 pixels (thumbnail or index image), 300 pixels (detail view) and 760 pixels (enlargement).

Metadata: The information about each image includes the image caption or title, the date the piece was published, the library division, specific material type, collection guide, the specific digital image ID, the digital record ID, and what date the digital record was published. Resolution information is also available.

Intended Audience: People interested in old American music; musicians, historians, perhaps students doing projects about American music history. Or people who are interested in NYPL projects.

Rainmakers from the Gods: Hopi Katsinam

Rainmakers from the Gods: Hopi Katsinam at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography

1) Collection Principles: This online exhibition follows from a physical exhibition at the Peabody Museum in 1997. For an older exhibit, this site is remarkably well put together and professional looking. It seems that the online version of the exhibition was created to document and preserve the exhibition, both the images of the Hopi dolls that were created and the extensive historical and ethnographical information that accompanies the exhibit.

2) Metadata: This site includes fairly extensive metadata to go along with the images created. In addition to the information provided about the dolls and the Hopi uses for them, the site provides credits for who designed the site and who photographed the dolls. With each image, there was also some sort of image identifier, a series of numbers that was not properly identified to the user, but which must be used internally by the Peabody Museum to catalogue their images/objects. There wasn’t any clear information on the resolution or type of images on the site. Each image is of a single doll, named for that doll, and including a short description of the specific doll, its purpose in Hopi culture, and its specific history.

3) Object Characteristics: Each image contains a single doll, set against a black background, shown from the front only, and lit from above. All the photos are the same size (on the page) and all the images look as if they belong together. The site doesn’t seem to focus totally on the images—rather, the images are placed within the larger historical narrative of the site. There is, however, an index of all the images grouped together, and a user can scroll through the images one by one in order by clicking a “next” arrow. The fact that these images are documenting 3-D objects (and that images aren’t given for all sides) suggests that the site is not aiming for focus on a close study of the object itself.

4) Intended Audience: This site seems to be created for those with a general interest in Hopi ethnography and these dolls in particular. It is not suitable for scholars, given the images are not comprehensive representations of the Hopi objects. The site certainly provides a thorough, though general, introduction to Hopi culture and the importance of these katsinam dolls within that culture.

George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers

George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers

Selection Decisions:

The digital collections mission is to make the unique contents of the Purdue Archives and special collections available to the public. The digital initiative is a collaboration between the library archives, special collections, information technology departments, technical services. At this point in time the digitization department has no plans to digitize anything outside their own collections that pertain directly to Purdue univeristy.

Metadata:

All the digital collections for this university use CONTENTdm. So each object has a thumbnail, a title, subject headings and a description before even clicking on it. Then of course there is a full bibliographic record once your click on the object that even includes the ppi and color depth information for the object.

Object Characteristics:

This collection includes photographs, correspondence, creative writing, printed material and personal belongings, and paraphernalia relating to the life and career of Amelia Earhart.

Intended Audience:

Purdue and aviation enthusiasts/scholars, feminist scholars, educators throughout the country teaching about this historical figure, and of course students of all ages.

Museum Victoria: Bugs

Although the ���About this Site��� page presents the site as a companion piece to a physical museum exhibition, Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum, it is an excellent example of a virtual collection. Its range of objects and interactivity demonstrates an understanding of how to purpose a collection for the online experience.

Selection Decisions

The site arranges information along themes accessible to young people. For example, within the section ���Life as a Bug���, there are subsections about senses, locomotion, reproduction and life cycles. Attached to each discrete piece of educational text, there is a correlating object, ranging from an image, to a short movie and even further bug facts. Therefore, the object selection decisions appear based on how well each object represents the information in the text.

However, the selection decisions for the physical exhibit Bugs Alive! followed several criteria: ���the bugs support the exhibition���s theme, can be kept year round, and can be displayed well.���

Metadata

For each image there is are two captions: the name only appears with the smaller image versions, while a more detailed caption, including at least a sentence long description, photo credit, and source info, appears with the enlarged images. A brief, descriptive caption accompanies the short movies before one views them.

Object Characteristics

Each image can be enlarged. The site offers movies for windows media player in two resolution levels. At the bottom of each section of text are keyword and classification hyperlinks to more information. There is also a flash cartoon. However, the most exciting object is the Bug Catcher Game, which allows one to sort, label and wave a magnifying lens over images of bugs. Sadly, for those with a slower connection or computer, the game could become more tedious than engaging.

Intended Audience

While the site���s interactivity and presentation of information is ideal for reaching young people, the range of content kept me busy for a very long time. I do not think that is a comment on me as much as it is on the variety of audiences the site could entertain and educate. Favorite bug fact: some ants farm caterpillars like humans farm cattle.

Drawing from Life

Drawing from Life: Caricatures from the American Art Portrait Gallery consists of selections of cartoons and caricatures put up by The Smithsonian Institution Libraries. The collection is taken from the American Portrait Gallery.

Collection Principles

They collection is orgnanized by an initial menu located on the homepage of the collection at The Smithsonian Libraries site. The user can choose options such as "introduction", "biographies of artists", "explore caricatures and cartoons", "bibliogrpahy/further reading", "credits", "American Art/Portrait Gallery Library", "SIL Digital Library", "Drawing from Life Hoempage." There are 11 artists depicted including William Hogarth. Exploring the collection allows a user to eiterh view featured books or view cartoons and caricatures.

Object Characteristics

Objects are images of black and white drawings of cartoon sketches or caricatures. Many of the images date to the late 19th century and early 20th century. Topics include golf, war, cave people and classical allusions. The collections allows users to enlarge the objects.

Metadata

The objects are described by a good amount of metadata. Below each image is a series of subject headings. Each image has the name of the illustrator, the book the illustration came from and the date.

Intended Audience

The exhibit is aimed at historians focusing on social commentary and humor, researchers on American self depiction in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts

This week I have selected The Bestiary: a Book of Beasts from the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. I find bestiaries fascinating, so when I stumbled upon this collection, I had to take a look. Also, it's the first of the collections that I've reviewed with OCR-searchable text, so I wanted to take a little time to play with the search capabilities.

Selection Principles

The book (White's The Bestiary: a Book of Beasts) was the first translation of a medieval bestiary, the University of Wisconsin claims. From the main page of the website, linked above:

"Bestiaries were second only to the Bible in their popularity and wide distribution during the Middle Ages. They were catalogs of animal stories, combining zoological information, myths, and legends. Great attention was given to bizarre, exotic, and monstrous creatures ... White provides an excellent appendix that explains how the creatures of the bestiary influenced the development of allegory and symbolism in art and literature."

Objects

The site offers page images, saved as .jpgs, with full-text OCR searching beneath the images. For example, chimera/chimaera is unfortunately absent, but 'cockatrice' and 'griffin' both bring up hits. Searching 'manticore' will bring up a list of pages, such as this one, and then the reader can click through at the bottom to continue reading.

Metadata

Book title, author, and page number are all given. It looks as if they scanned a book and then ran OCR. Interestingly, you can search other books from the search menu, so it looks as if there are more options in the digital library. You can also 'search all.' If you 'search all' and get a hit, the record will tell you which books contain the pages that have registered as hits.

Intended Audience

To quote the 'about' page of the website:

" It is hoped that the search features of the History of Science and Technology Collection will be a convenient aid to scholarship and study. Both the individual titles and the collection as a whole can be browsed and searched by keyword. Users are advised to consult the table of contents and indexes in individual works to conduct a thorough search for specific information in the texts."

cARTalog Digital Collection

The cARTalog Digital Collection at the University of Iowa is a collection of artwork made from one quarter of the university's card catalog that was retired in 2004.

Selection Principles
There is no information on the cARTalog site about how or why a particular card was selected for artwork. The description on the site claims the project, "hopes to find as many creative uses as possible for the salvaged card catalog cards and generate a sense of community among those who loved the card catalog."

Objects
The site offers a sample search that shows images of four different kinds of objects: collages, sculptures, artists' books, and textiles. Each object has an image and associated metadata. The CMS is CONTENTdm, so the display is similar to other sites that use that CMS.

Metadata
Title, creator, date original, description, geographic subject, chronological subject, type (DCMITV, AAT, and IMT), URL, digital collection, contributing institution, archival collection, finding aid, rights management, contact info, digitization specifications, date digital, language, and file name. All metadata is complete.

Intended Audience
Considering this project is devoted to honoring the card catalog, I would guess that librarians make up a large part of the intended audience. Since the project is so complete, I would also say it is intended to demonstrate the quality of the UI Digital Library.

Imperial History of the Middle East (Animated Map): http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf

 

    Imperial History of the Middle East (Animated Map): http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf

a.     Selection decisions: Created by “Maps of War,” it seems they are associated with a library (or they have one of their own), because if you click on their icon on the map, it takes you to: http://www.mapsofwar.com/, and you can see that they have a library of animated maps and that the most recent additions are a “History of Religion” map and this one. They also have a series on WWII, Iraq, and the “March of Democracy.” It is unclear whom they are affiliated with, however, since it seems they also have a series on Black American Art, and the Causes of the War of 1812. There is very little information on the website about the selection decisions about why certain maps are animated and provided by “Maps of War,” or if this serves as a gathering point and portal to multimedia maps from all over the web.

b.     Metadata: When you hold your cursor over different parts of the timeline along the bottom of the map, dialog bubbles pop up, telling you “The beginning,” “The Persian Empire,” etc. As the map animation plays, areas of the map lighten in color and labels appear, according to Empire. The timeline ends in 2006, so one could presume that this map was created in this year. Because they use different colors for different Empires, it’s super easy to tell where the Empires conquered each other and where their frontiers overlapped. It also allows you to see where and when the Empires coexisted. And because it zooms in and out, it really drives home how HUGE some of these Empires were, such as the Persian and Macedonian Empires. When the map gets to 1948, it starts to delineate borders, telling the viewer that this is the time in which borders and nation-states are established – tellingly, they keep the color blue, which is the color used for “European Colonialism,” and the area covered is relatively the same – both of which really drives home the relation between colonialism and the establishment of nation-states in the Middle East. The establishment of Israel is a red territory within the sea of blue… something which might show their bias against the establishment of Israel. The final stage of the map has dates appear for each nation-state for the date of their independence. This stage of the map is called the “Era of Independence.”

c.     Characteristics of the objects (in the exhibition) and the exhibition as an object: In animated format, viewers see a map of the Middle East and 5,000 years of conquest in 90 seconds. On the bottom of the map, there is a timeline, which scrolls along as the map zooms in and out; and a play, pause, and stop button, very easily recognizable.

d.     The intended audience: By using colors, the map appeals to visual learners. By zooming in and out, the map appeals to those who are spatially oriented in their conceptual thinking. Finally, by having an interactive timeline, this appeals to those viewers who are more mathematical or concrete in their thinking. I think this is geared toward a general audience, given the prevalence of these different techniques for viewing and learning the map. It would be good for schools or home schooling, or anybody studying/interested in this region. This is yet another example of utilizing new technologies to turn a traditional paper material into an interactive learning tool.

The Institute For Figuring is one of the coolest organizations that I've heard about in a long time. It is dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. "The Institute's interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring." It's great stuff; they can only be faulted for lack of strong metadata standards.

Selection Principles
This seems like a relatively new venture; there are only four online exhibits, and about 10 exhibitions, the oldest of which goes back to 2002. It appears that everything the IFF does, goes online -- and often is created exclusively for online consumption.

Object Characteristics and Metadata
Their online material is divided on their website into galleries, lectures, online exhibits, and exhibitions. The exhibitions are collections that have been displayed in a physical space some time in the past. The online exhibitions take you through a linear sequence, but you can jump back and forth to other sections of the exhibit. At the end there are links to further resources, the online gallery, and so on.

Within an exhibit, .GIF photos and tables are generously interspersed, along w/ .PDF downloads to make your own model of something, for instance, a hyperbolic soccer ball. You couldn't zoom into the photos or tables, though, which I think would have been a nice user-friendly touch. You could download them; there didn't seem to be any standard for how they were titled - some were the photographer's last name, others a one-word description with a number.

The lectures themselves had a bit more standardized metadata; each one had a unique code (e.g., IFF-L5) and when navigating to one, the intro paragraph would explain who gave the lecture, who hosted/sponsored it, and where and when it occurred, along with hyperlinks. This was done in narrative form, not in a list/field format.

The galleries are displayed in a Flash-based slideshow format, but you have the option of opening any image in a separate window, from which you can download the .JPG. No metadata was associated with these photos, however - no title, photographer, or anything.

Audience
Their stated mission is to enhance the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. I would argue that any intellectually curious person would find their offerings fascinating.

London Transport Museum

The goal of the London Transport Museum online is to increase access to the permanent collections, allowing visitors to follow the physical museum narrative, exploring by themed gallery ("Digging Deeper") or floor plan, or browse by collection (vehicles, posters, equipment, etc). I hadn't seen the floor plan concept before, and enjoyed the reference to the physical museum location and layout. Site visitors are encouraged to engage in dialogue with the museum - sharing stores and memories. There is a "share a story link" on every page, as well as an area compiling the comments. The online museum is pretty new - the only stories or comments I found were from the focus group.

The online collection presents those objects on permanent display. At the head of every section or theme, there is a brief introduction describing the theme, number and date range of objects. At the object level, there is also a brief description, dimensions, date, ID number, and related objects. Additional resources, such as links to essays and other online exhibits (for example, Exploring 20th Century London, which I will definitely explore later).

The Online Museum project was supported by funding from Renaissance London ("museums for changing lives") and developed by the Digital resources project team (the individuals are listed). No collection policy or digital practices were discussed.

The museum definitely has a tourist feel, but I believe there is research value in the information they are providing. It could certainly provide an interesting starting point for research in transportation, graphic design, public transportation trends, etc.

Microscope Imaging Station

Exploratorium - The museum of science, art and human perception
http://www.exploratorium.edu/imaging_station/index.php

I’ve always wanted to visit the Exploratorium. Its interactive exhibits are famous worldwide. Since 1993 the museum has allowed virtual visitors, like me, to explore these exhibits online.

Collection Principles
The website serves as more than a mirror of current exhibit at the museum. The Exploratorium has developed the website into a valuable educational resource. The MIS website contains not only images produced at the station in the museum, but also provides movies, descriptions, handouts and activities related to these images.

Object Characteristic & Metadata

Each image or video allows for some level of interactivity. The user can enlarge, view the scale bar or click on Materials & Methods to find details on how the sample was prepared. Here’s an example – this is the information given for a blood cell image:

A drop of blood was diluted in saline solution, then sandwiched between a slide and coverslip (using a thin strip of silicon rubber as a spacer). The image was taken on an inverted compound microscope using a 40x DIC objective and a digital camera.

There are many interesting features beyond the Gallery. The section Classroom Explorations provides educators with a thorough list of images, handouts and worksheets (in pdf form) for various biology topics. Users can download flipbooks and wallpapers of various microscopic scenes and images.

Intended Audience
The website can be used by both real and virtual visitors of the MIS. It gives and opportunity to both newly explore and to expand on an actual visit since it offers so may activities beyond just images and videos. Though virtual users lose out on the chance to actually manipulate the microscopes at the station, the website offers enough content to be a viable and fun alternative.

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