Twenty Years of Arts Computing
CHArt Twentieth Annual Conference
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FUTURES PAST: Twenty Years of Arts Computing |
Vickie O'Riordan, University of California, San Diego, USA
This is the Modern World: Collaborating with ARTstor
January 2002 marked the beginning of a valuable collaboration between the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of California, San Diego Libraries. A substantial grant from the Mellon Foundation gave the UCSD Libraries slide collection the opportunity and capability to contribute a significant amount of images and associated cataloging data to ARTstor.
The UCSD slide collection, started in the early 1970s, contains 250,000 slides, the majority created from Copy Stand photography. A library resource, the slide collection is used campus-wide by UCSD faculty and students. It contains a robust collection of art images from a wide range of time periods and cultures, as well as a substantial number of images from the humanities and social sciences.
When the slide collection went online in the mid-1980s the decision was made to create a full catalog record for each slide complete with subject headings. In the early 1990s the slide records were moved into the UCSD Library catalog and mapped to MARC.This paper will cover the following four areas:
• Early decisions made by the UCSD slide collection that facilitated its inclusion in ARTstor;
•The work and planning required to digitize over 200,000 slides from a continuously used university slide collection;
•Lessons learned working with the ARTstor metadata group and the effect this had on continuing image cataloging at UCSD;
•Finally, discoveries made while working with UCSD faculty and students as ARTstor beta testers for the past academic year in terms of educational implications and classroom readiness.The complexity and scale of this partnership required considerable planning and utilized a wide range of resources. The result is a successful community resource for sharing images within an expanded educational audience.