Posts tagged collections
New York Public Library’s Stereogranimator Lets You Make GIFs Out Of 19th Century Stereographs:
“With the Stereogranimator, the NYPL is letting users transform 19th century stereographs into GIFs, which lets people experience these historical images the way someone in the 1800s might have. Drawing on a collection of over 40,000 stereographs, the Stereogranimator is a project of the NYPL Labs, an experimental unit at the library using digital means to develop new tools for research.
“If you look through enough of them, you start to notice that many from before 1900 come in seemingly-identical pairs. What you may not realize is that these pairs were meant to be viewed together, each side lending the other a sense of depth that a photograph alone cannot possess,” Joshua Heineman, who began a version of the Stereogranimator as a personal project on his blog, wrote on the Huffington Post. “Using stereoscopes, the entertainment-seeking public of the 19th century immersed themselves in these 3D photographs (called stereographs) in a manner akin to how we now view movies, video games or cellphone screens.”
From Museum Design Lab blog:
It goes something like this: if you do not collect there is nothing to conserve. Scholarship and interpretation requires an object of study. If you do not have scholarship then you cannot teach and if finally you do not have anything unique to say then what will your exhibition hope to communicate to its visitors? That may be a bit rash but you get the point.
Woruldhord project homepage
An interesting collaborative idea from the University of Oxford, brought to my attention by the Bamburgh Research Project blog:
The project is part of the JISC-funded initiative Runcoco: How to Run a Community Collection Online and sets out to collect together into an online hoard, digital objects related to the teaching, study, or research of Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period of history. The collection is now open, and will close on October 14th 2010. Go to the collection site to make a submission.
The concept is quite simple. Members of the public, of academia, of special interest groups are asked to submit via an online web site any images, documents, audio, video they have of material they would be happy to share with the rest of the world to further the study of Old English and the Anglo-Saxons.
We would welcome images of buildings, sites, artefacts; teaching handouts or presentations; audio of readings or interviews; video clips of crafts, sites; and so on. In fact anything that you feel would benefit teachers, researchers, and interested parties who wish to learn more about the Anglo-Saxons.
Oxford University will collect the material together and then make everything submitted freely available on the web for educational purposes to a worldwide audience. You will retain copyright over anything you submit but you will simply have to agree to its redistribution on the website. The collection is now open, and will close on October 14th 2010. Go to the collection site to make a submission.
The Scottish Cup - the oldest national football trophy in the world
Read the full article here: The Griffin in Queens: Its Modern History
On June 6th the New York Post published an article by Melissa Klein about a warehouse in Queens that stores “some 2500 pieces” seized in the NYC area by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the Post reporter was given “a rare look” at the warehouse hoard. One confiscated object briefly discussed, along with a photo (published courtesy of ICE agent James McAndrew), is a hollow silver griffin, called a rhyton (incorrectly; another ICE agent told a colleague it was a censor), to which are attached three upright funnels. McAndrew told Klein that it came from Iran, dated to 700 BC, and was brought to the U.S. by the antiquities dealer Hicham Aboutaam in 2000, thence purchased for $950,000
Both the Post article and the DOJ press release omit one important detail: the griffin is a forgery, and a badly made one at that. Everything is wrong about it.
Open Access: Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum
In 2000 the International Committee of CVA asked the Beazley Archive to prepare a feasibility study for the digitisation of out of print fascicules, approximately 250 for the web. Later that year the Union Académique Internationale formally invited the Beazley Archive to undertake the project.
In 2001 The Getty Grant Program awarded £75,000 for a three-year project to be carried out in Oxf ord.
The CVA project, to digitise these fascicules began in 2002 and ended in September 2004. The project is on-going; new fascicules are being published and participating museums have the opportunity to contribute to the on-line database.
Crowdsourcing the Museum
From the MuseumNext blog
Museums have long survived on the generosity of volunteers who carry out vital work to support the everyday work of the institution. Today I want to look at how volunteering is evolving for the digital world, with interesting projects which ask the public to volunteer their time online.
Crowdsourcing:
Crowdsourcing is the term used to describe people coming together online to collectively solve a problem. A task is collectively shared by those taking part, whether that is to label objects in a digital collection or to build an exhibition.Here are few interesting ways in which museums are using crowdsourcing:
V&A – Search the Collections:
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a collection database of 140,000 images, these are selected from a database automatically and don’t always show the object to it’s best. The V&A recently launched a crowdsourcing project to ask members of the public to help them to select the best images to use in the collections database.
There are over 116,000 objects which the V&A hopes the public with volunteer to help them sift through. You can sign up to help them and give the V&A crowdsourcing project project a go yourself here.
This is a great idea, but I wonder how they quality contol what people do? Some of the examples (like the one above) are quite straightforward, but others are a bit more subjective. It’s good fun though to have a look at the items, either because you can’t make it to the museum or because alot of these items aren’t on public display.
Also, it’s a shame that although people do it out of enthusiasm for museums that there is no real opportunity to put it on a CV as you would it you did gallery attending volunteering, on site cataloguing or the like. Just a thought for those trying to break into the biz rather than spend their retirement or lunchtime doing something interesting/worthwhile.
The 99% of the British Museum not on show
I love the bit at the end that gently puts it out there that of 80 000 objects only 1% are on display and:
Although the museum rotates the objects on show, any item can be seen by appointment.
Endless. Possibilities.
