CHArt CHArt Computers and the History of Art - 1997 Conference Paper Abstract
The Visual Arts Data Service, part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, has a mission to curate electronic data for the higher education community in the Visual Arts. This involves accessioning data created by members of this community with a high scholarly content with the aim of providing streamlined access to this material for research purposes. This service is perceived as fulfilling a key role in the provision of electronic information. Firstly, many institutions have created and are in the process of creating scholarly material in electronic forms which are vulnerable to the rapid developments in technology. In the same way that an art object is vulnerable to the process of decay, electronic data may exist in formats which will become rapidly obsolete and therefore be lost to both their original creators and the research community as a whole. Therefore VADS is actively engaged in the process of preserving this material for future use by the application of standardised storage and retrieval mechanisms. VADS is also committed to the role of reducing the inherently random nature of this material. It aims to do this primarily by actively engaging in the process of the identification, evolution and application of standards. These will be applied both to the process of indexing the data content and also to the physical format of the data itself. VADS also aims to provide a rigorous process of scholarly assessment of proposed materials by the use of a network of experts in the different VADS subject areas. Therefore it is anticipated that such a service will make a very real contribution to the future of information provision to the higher education community into the next century and beyond.
Catherine Grout currently works at Surrey Institute of Art & Design on the development of the Visual Arts Data Service, a JISC funded project to "curate" electronic information for the higher education community in the visual arts. She has been involved in the teaching of Birkbeck Computer Applications and History of Art MA where she specialised in image databases and EC project issues. She has a degree in history from Oxford University, and has been working on a part-time PhD in Victorian art history with Birkbeck.