Embedded Files
Locations of metadata spreadsheets, image files, etc.:
Location of Image TIFFs: //Removable Hard Drive in Archives / Art Collections
Location of Image low-res JPEGs: ContentDM server; will need help from Maria to transfer? Or re-create from TIFFs
Nota Bene: The following are notes regarding how the Art Collections at Pacific University were documented in digital form. Much of this information is from my recollections as of 2015. These notes are for internal documentation purposes and they have not been vetted by the Art Advisory Board. - Eva Guggemos, 6/30/2015
Overview of the Art Collections
Pacific University has several art collections, including its Asian Art, Latin American Art and Permanent Art collections. The paintings, sculpture, mixed media and other formats that exist in these collections were acquired over decades. Active collecting began in greater earnest in the 1990s. Art created by faculty, by students and by external artists was collected purposefully in some cases. In other cases, it was donated to the Art Collection without being specifically selected. Some material was donated to the Pacific via University Advancement. Art Faculty were involved in collecting the material through the Kathrin Cawein Gallery, and some material was acquired through a committee process led by the University's Art Placement / Art Advisory committees. However, collecting practices have not been professionalized through a formal art curation program.
First Digitization and Public Access to the Collections in ContentDM, 2009-2011
By the 2000s, it was clear that more intellectual and physical control over the collections was necessary. Some art pieces were photographed to document them beginning around 2005. An Art Committee formed around the year 2009 and aimed to create basic records of the University's art holdings. Around this time, a half-time art collections assistant who reported to the Art Department Faculty was hired to help track and document art holdings. Each piece of art that could be located was photographed and most were given asset tags. A spreadsheet that documented the artworks' accession numbers, provenance and other metadata was created. In 2011, three virtual collections were created on the ContentDM platform to showcase the Asian Art, Latin American Art and Permanent Art collections. The Permanent Art collection web site was closed, for copyright reasons, to off-campus users. The ContentDM database provided reference-quality images of each piece of art along with basic descriptive metadata, notes about provenance and the location of the objects. Over 1,000 higher-resolution images in TIFF format were saved to an external hard drive and backed up remotely, while low-resolution access images were uploaded to the ContentDM instance.
Metadata Clean-up and Migration to Omeka, 2015-2016
After the departure of the half-time collections assistant in 2015, the collections were left without a dedicated staff member overseeing their condition and location. The Library Director hired a temporary assistant to update and correct the existing spreadsheets. The temporary assistant filled out additional details and corrected inaccuracies regarding the 1,000+ pieces of art that had been tracked by the Art Committee. She found instances when the Unique Identifiers in the ContentDM instance did not match the digital object files and/or their accession numbers. The assistant corrected the file names based on the public metadata and low-resolution filenames on the public ContentDM site. Unfortunately, these were not matched with the higher-resolution TIFF files on the external hard drive. Thus as of 6/2015, a small number of the high-resolution files no longer match up with their low-res counterparts. This is an issue for potential later clean-up. However, since the quality of the original photographs of the artwork were not ideal (i.e. they were not professionally lit or de-skewed, were sometimes cropped strangely, etc.), the Art Department may alternatively decide to create an entirely new set of digital images in the future.
For a variety of reasons, we decided to migrate the online collections from ContentDM to the Omeka platform. Using the corrected spreadsheet created by the temporary assistant, the Archivist normalized the metadata to conform to archival content standards. File names were also normalized to conform to filenaming policy.
As of Fall 2015, the migration to Omeka is still in process. Public access to the digitized versions remains in ContentDM. Links are at the bottom of this page: http://www.pacificu.edu/libraries/collections/digital-collections
Notes about Limits on Access to the Permanent Art Collection
Because many of the works of art within the University's Permanent Art Collection are recent pieces that are still under the copyright of their creators, we did not wish to make high-resolution images publicly available on the internet. While the collections are hosted via ContentDM (2011-2015), the solution has been to limit use of the collection to on-campus users only. This is clearly not ideal and also presented some technical problems when we moved to Omeka, since the architecture of the site makes it more difficult to limit access based on IP Address on a per-collection basis. Following guidelines published by the Association of Art Museum Directors, we decided to use thumbnail-size images that would be publicly accessible. Higher-resolution images would only be available on request to the Archives, following normal reference/permissions practices.
Thumbnail image = a low resolution, small version of less than commercial quality (less than 250 x 300 pixels) - Association of Art Museum Directors (a) (2011) AAMD Policy on the use of “thumbnail” digital images in museum online initiatives. https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/Thumbnail%20Images%20Policy.pdf
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