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Art History Image Database

The Department of Art History, with the guidance of Rick Asher, has embarked upon a major effort that will eventually digitize its entire slide collection for both classroom use and student review via the Internet. This would make Minnesota the first art history program in the country to use an all-digital image library for instructional purposes. The department is piloting the project by focusing on two areas of the curriculum, South Asian and Islamic art history. The goal is to digitize and organize all the slides required to teach courses in those areas -- both the department's library as well as the instructors' private collections -- using a Web-accessible database.

instructional goals

Question(s): Please describe the instructional goals you were attempting to achieve. Who was the intended audience? What strategies had been tried in the past? What did you hope to improve?

This project was designed to address three problems common to many art history courses:

  1. for instructors, the repetition involved in preparing for class
    Art history courses depend on images—most often slides—that are traditionally stored in a departmental slide library. In preparation for each class session, an instructor must consult his or her notes to construct a list of slides to be shown during that class (if he or she has taught the class before) or construct a list of images from scratch using the library's catalog. Once a list has been developed, the instructor must visit the library, pull the slides, and queue them in slide carousels for display. Once the class session is over, the instructor must return her or his slides to the library for use by other faculty, meaning that the whole process must be repeated the next time the instructor teaches that course. This is an extremely time-consuming process and can lead to difficulties should instructors need to use similar materials—the art history department tried duplicating slides in the past but, with a collection numbering nearly a half million slides, the process was too expensive.
  2. provide students access to images after the lecture
    Art history courses revolve around images, most often two images projected side-by-side (generally 30–60 images per one hour class session). In traditional art history courses, students have to develop good memories and/or take copious notes on the images displayed in class, supplementing these with course texts or other sources to help them prepare for their exams and papers—once a pair of images has been shown in class, the students no longer have access to them.
  3. ameliorate some of the perceptual problems associated with displaying three-dimensional art by means of two-dimensional media (i.e., slides)
    Teaching courses about three-dimensional works—sculpture, architecture, etc.—can be particularly difficult when instructors are forced to rely on two-dimensional media such as slides or the printed page. Moving to computer technologies might eventually obviate some of these difficulties by enabling instructors to construct three dimensional models of sculpture that can be 'rotated' by users in QuickTime VR or develop virtual 'walkthroughs' of archeological sites, thereby giving students some notion of the works' natures as fully dimensional creations that occupy depth.
To alleviate these problems, the Art History department has embarked on an ambitious project to develop an all-digital image collection by scanning the department's slide collection and storing those images—with appropriate identifying information to ease future search and retrieval—in a database. Once a faculty member has developed a list of images for display in a particular class session, she or he can download them to a folder on her or his desktop and modify them (e.g., 'zooming in' on a particular feature in a painting that might be indicative of a genre or an artist's individual style); students will be able to access those images by searching the network-enabled database with suitable parameters (the work's title or artist, style, geographic/historiographic descriptors, etc.).

tel strategy

Question(s): What technology enhanced learning (TEL) strategies did you adopt to complete this project? Was the content presented differently to your students than in past (non-TEL) applications?

In the past art history instructors have had to rely on analog media for in-class presentation—with this project, the art history department is stepping beyond the limitations of slides by exploring the possibilities created by converting to network-delivered, digitized images. The decision to create such a teaching and learning resource has raised a number of technical, legal, and pedagogical issues, including:

copyright challenges
Owing to the fact that many of the images in the department's collection come from museums, books, 'limited rights' shots from private collections, and other sources from which permission had been obtained for classroom use, the idea of making these images available via the World Wide Web creates some copyright concerns for many copyright holders and and liability concerns for the department.

organizational issues
Given the powerful relational referencing capabilities and the differences between digital and analog presentation of imagery, embarking on the digitization project raised issues of how to organize a large catalog of images for both browsing and searching.

resolution problems
Perhaps the biggest challenge posed by the decision to create an all digital image library has been the question "what resolution should be used when scanning images?" Since the library serves the dual purposes of supporting networked instruction via laptop computers and screen projectors (which demand relatively small filesizes for rapid transmission over networks and are only capable of displaying relatively low resolution imagery) and aiding research (which demands high quality images, both for the study of issues pertaining to artistic style/connoisseurship and for hardcopy output via offset printing or similar), art history development team members were faced with a real dilemma in determining a workable compromise.

To address these challenges, art history has adopted the following strategies: The department will focus initially on courses where there are few copyright problems -- courses in which many of the images come from the instructors' private collections. The University Counsel has further encouraged the Art History Department to be aggressive in their interpretation of the fair use doctrine as it applies to the use of copyrighted materials in the classroom.

The department will use a FileMaker Pro database as the backbone for organizing the image library; the individual records will be organized precisely like the records in the analog library catalog, which has the virtues of simplicity (no changes required to existing system and no new information required for existing catalog entries) and familiarity (faculty won't be required to learn a new system for locating their materials). Images are to be imported into the database and provided with identifying information (such as title, artist[s], genre, historical period, geographical identifiers, etc.), parameters that faculty and students can use to search for a particular image or category of images.

Finally, the images will be scanned at three resolutions. The highest resolution (useful primarily for research and print output) will be written to CD-ROM to save on server space; the other two will be made available on networked storage accessible to students and faculty.

hardware and software

Question(s): What hardware or software did you use to produce your project? Did you have to do anything unusual to make the software work for your specific applications?

The art history development team uses a Nikon CoolScan slide scanner connected to a Power Macintosh G3 to digitize slides and Adobe Photoshop to edit the scanned images. These finished images were then imported into a FileMaker Pro database and annotated to ease later search and retrieval by faculty and student users.

project team

Question(s): How many people worked on the project? What were their roles? Did you work with any central support units?

Eight people worked on this project. A lot of our graduate student assistants' time was spent on slide scanning and data entry.

instructional outcome

Question(s): What was the instructional outcome of your project? Did you achieve your goals? Why or why not? Do you intend to make any revisions to your project?

The Art History Department is implementing the system for the first time during this (Spring 2000) semester. As to whether they've achieved their goals, Asher says "So far so good. Students have access to images after my lecture." In the long term, Professor Asher expects to evaluate the efficacy of the the new system once the image database has been used for at least a couple of semesters; the database will be updated and upgraded based on this evaluation.

innovative feature

Question(s): Please describe the most innovative aspects of your project.

According to Dr. Asher, the Art History database is not so much a technical as a pedagogical innovation—providing students with access not only to the department's slide library but also to previously unpublished images from the instructors' private collections. The latter slides result from extensive field work of the South Asian and Islamic art specialists teaching the pilot courses this term, thus having the advantages of being specifically targetted to the subject matter covered in these two courses and—and perhaps more importantly—they pose no copyright problems for the department. The combined departmental/private slide database will ultimately provide the foundation for developing Web-based art history courses.

advice

Question(s): Do you have any planning, design, or development advice for other instructional multimedia developers contemplating a project like yours?

Professor Asher recommends that instructors intending to use computers as presentation tools in the classroom verify that their classrooms are equipped technologically for the materials they intend to use (e.g., at a minimum, you'll need to have an Etherjack—for connecting your computer to the Internet—in the classroom if you are using World Wide Web for instruction). As Asher relates, "one of our biggest challenges has been making an art history course—which has significantly different technological requirements than many other lecture-based courses—work in a classroom designed for more general usage. One size doesn't fit all."

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Last modified Tuesday, 19-Jun-2007 15:32:44 CDT