Humanities HumanitiesThe Visual Resources Collections are used by students, faculty, museum curators, picture researchers and scholars from around the world to facilitate classroom presentation, lecture and dissertation illustration, and high-level research. Many photographs of the same objects or archaeological sites are housed at the Institute, allowing scholars to see how particular objects age or how excavations progress; the photos also list sources of published information on those objects or sites.
The three functions of research, presentation and illustration fall under the broad heading "Visual Documentation Research"; they are the heart of art history, in that they facilitate the analysis and study of art and permit its publication and dissemination. Images help resolve one of the biggest hindrances to the study of art history: the physical location of the art being studied. If the student can't get to the art, the art is brought to the student, using images as stand-ins for the real thing.
Until very recently, visual documentation research was conducted completely manually, by spreading slides out on a light box or black and white prints on a table. Image manipulation as such did not exist, beyond the possibilities of physical rotation of prints or reversal of transparencies. Combining images, too, was impossible, short of pushing two projection screens together, or using tracing paper over a print, unless a researcher possessed advanced darkroom skills and a copy of the needed negative.
Photographic images, unfortunately, deteriorate most quickly in the environment in which they are also the most useful; the more students who wish to use the same photograph, the greater the chance that that photograph will be damaged in some way. The computer's ability to transform an image, while preserving the original photographic copy, holds forth the possibility of developing new ways of looking at images, new ways of conducting art historical research, and new ways of maintaining the image collections integral to such research.
The Icon Project grew from a faculty member's request to use a computer image database in a graduate seminar on Byzantine icons. The project seemed ideal for such an experiment: the number of images involved was rather small by our standards (between 500 and 750; classes on broader topics might require many thousands of images) and the number of published sources was limited. We already had most of the images required for the class in our collection of 35mm-format materials, so the initial step of assembling material for scanning was already complete.
The Museum System in lightbox mode. The program can display up to twelve thumbnails at a time.
The faculty member who made the request, Professor Thomas Mathews, was excited about the project despite the fact that he had never used a computer in this way before. His students were willing to contribute their time and effort to help build the database once we got started.
There were several obstacles to overcome, however. Our department had no computers capable of reproducing images (we did not even have color monitors in 1995, when this project started); we had no software experience, no imaging experience, and no in-house technical support staff. In other words, we had to build the entire project from scratch in under a year, before January 1996, when his class was first scheduled to meet.
Having never undertaken such a project, the process was both confusing and daunting. Professor Mathews, Institute Director James R. McCredie and I previewed both commercially available and customized software without immediately finding a package that fit our needs. Off-the-shelf software was too broad, designed for more applications than we wished to make, and customized software was beyond our technical abilities.
In addition to the technical needs of the project, there were also staff constraints to accommodate. The staff of the VRC would be charged both with learning the new software and its applications quickly, and in teaching the software to a class of students who had varying levels of computer skills. We were looking for software that met our technical needs, but that was also close to self-explanatory, and therefore as easy to use and as easy to teach as possible.
We settled on Gallery Systems' The Museum System software as best meeting our needs after seeing it in use at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum. The Museum System (TMS) is a collections management package for text and images designed for use in museums; it includes field structures tailored to the needs of museum curators and registrars, allowing textual information from many offices and many sources to be tied to specific objects.
The software incorporates a function called the Object Package, which lets users assemble subsets of the image database for personal reference. For us, the fact that many students could use the same image simultaneously was one of the greatest benefits of this software package. Also, because thumbnails and mid-resolution PhotoCD-formatted scans are held on the hard drive, rather than jukeboxed on CDs, image retrieval, especially of thumbnails, is incredibly fast. This enables our students to use the computer screen to browse through many images quickly, just as they would use a light box.
An Object Package of linked images. You can program sets into the main database, so if you choose one image from a set, you can see other images associated with it.
Once a software decision had been made, implementation management began. Decisions concerning service bureaus had to be made. We had neither the money to purchase scanning hardware, nor the staff time or expertise to learn how to use it. Consequently, we chose to send our 35mm slides (cleaned, numbered, and sorted into vertical and horizontal orientations) to an outside service bureau (DigiFilm, in Queens) for scanning to PhotoCD format.
Initial data entry consisted of keying the basic information about each object from its slide label into TMS. Vocabulary control (describing the images with consistent terms) was handled by one of the graduate students taking the seminar; for 10 to 20 hours a week during the course of the term, this student lent invaluable support and field expertise to the project.
One problem that arose almost immediately was scheduling. The VRC staff, attempting to work ahead of the class, requested that the class choose its images a week in advance of when they might actually be needed. Everyone in the class was used to working with a standing image resource, one that was immediately accessible, so we had to encourage them to plan ahead. The staff put in many hours of overtime, and our service bureau did our scans on 24-hour turnaround to keep up.
Questions of security also had to be addressed early in the process. Our limited budget was actually an advantage in this instance; since neither the VRC nor the Institute was networked in any way in 1995 (this is still the case; even now, only limited direct NYU-NET access is possible, and no LAN environment yet exists), it was decided to maintain the database on only one computer, kept in a secure area. Students wishing to make use of the database were required to schedule an appointment, and were closely monitored. Downloading in any format was not permitted; the database computer did not even have an attached printer. Since remote access was not possible and all users were known to the staff by sight, security ceased to be a concern.
Copyright, on the other hand, always troubles image curators, who are neither content-owners nor intellectual property lawyers. Again, our limited budget proved to be a blessing in disguise. We were not mounting the images to a website (beneficial as that might have been); the images were used only for face-to-face instruction, research and presentation, and were only accessible on-site on one computer. This situation seemed to keep us well within the four-step fair use strictures of the 1976 copyright laws -- although it defeated any possibility that digitizing our collections would make them any easier to reach.
Once up and running, the Icon Project proved to be a useful tool. Students used the computer in class for presentation, in addition to conducting much of their research on it. Presentation proved somewhat difficult, since we had made no provisions for the hardware needed for data projection. The computer that held the database was wheeled into and out of class every week, and the students clustered around the one available 17-inch monitor. We tried a VGA splitter and multiple monitors, borrowing a screen from the Stephen Chan Library at the IFA, but the dozen or so class participants were still forced to squint across the seminar table at much-too-small images.
Undaunted, the students anthropomorphized the computer, naming it and making it part of their class. Indeed, one of the truly unanticipated difficulties of the project lay in keeping the class focused on the study of Byzantine icons, rather than on how to use the computer.
The students who were most comfortable with computers before the class began made the best use of it this new context. The most able students quickly grasped the potential of image manipulation afforded by TMS, generating new images (using Adobe Photoshop and the high resolution scans of each object available on CD) and incorporating them into the database as related material. These students also used each available technology to its fullest benefit, capitalizing on what each does best: slides are still the medium of choice among art historians for crisp, bright still images for projection purposes, while nothing can compete with the manipulation possible using digital records of the same object.
Clicking on a thumbnail gives a full screen image.
The variety of manipulations available to the students participating in The Icon Project was staggering. Using TMS, students had access to point-and-click grayscale functions. Photoshop's color correction, rotation and tweaking tools made repair and conservation speculation possible. An issue for future consideration is the scholarly ethics of such manipulation; if database managers find it as easy to alter images as our Icon Project students did, care will have to be taken to ensure that altered images are labeled as such, and the integrity of the original object is preserved through its digital surrogate.
It would be unfair to conclude by leaving the impression that The Icon Project was an unqualified success, for it was not. Difficulties in scheduling, the lack of remote access, inadequate presentation hardware, and finite funding were balanced against the enthusiastic support of the staff of Gallery Systems (Jay Hoffman in particular, who was more or less on call to the project for several months), and the delight the students took in trying something new. Students have expressed an intense desire to see the IFA's entire image collection online, downloadable into papers and projects and accessible from remote sites.
The VRC has maintained the site license for TMS, and now has mounted the most recent upgrade, despite the fact that the networking of the IFA is still purely speculative. Other curators of image collections at NYU, most notably Kayla Stotzky of the collections at the College of Arts and Sciences, and Kathleen MacQueen of the collection at the Program in Art and Art Professions, are exploring ways of connecting their resources with the IFA and sharing cataloging data and images via NYU-NET.
Pressure from incoming students to provide avenues for online research and the application of new technologies in the classroom encourages the continued use of tools such as The Museum System. The potential effect on the discipline of art history, as the technologies for image databases become more widely used, is far-reaching and exciting.![[ C ]](../icons/CSmSp98.gif){kind=icon}
Jenni Rodda is the curator of Visual Resources Collections at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts.
jenni.rodda@nyu.edu
Posted January 20, 1998. Last reviewed December 6, 2005.
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