CHArt Eighteenth Annual Conference

Polly Christie, Visual Arts Data Service, Surrey Institute of Art and Design, UK
Curating Digital Collections and Curating Collections Digitally

By way of a digitisation feasibility study, VADS is currently managing the creation of a National Fine Art Education Digital Collection. While exploring all the technical issues inherent in digitisation, the importance of establishing a high quality, focused collection in terms of content, which celebrates the practice and teaching of fine art in the UK, has been paramount and has proved challenging in the digital environment, since traditional notions of selection and curation have become subverted and re-addressed in this context.

Using the Council for National Academic Awards Collection as a core of 69 works, the Fine Art collection has been augmented by selecting works from a further ten Higher Education Institutions around the UK.

This paper will discuss the systems, mechanisms and bodies which have been put into place in order to select both institutions and works for inclusion in the project, as well as to investigate how best to curate or organise the pieces in the digital gallery. Furthermore, as with traditional analogue gallery spaces, the curator's remit as custodian of the collection is implicit, and on-going exhibitions and digital acquisitioning in this distributed, virtual environment need to be continually explored through digital curation.

See http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/fineart/index.html for further details of project.

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