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The impetus for this book is the art information community's very
real need for practical guidelines on how to lead end-users to relevant
images of art and architecture online.
The authors of the four chapters are professionals whose daily work
and long-term research focus on providing access to art. Sara Shatford
Layne gives a definition and overview of subject access to images
of works of art and discusses related issues and solutions. Patricia
Harpring addresses practical implementations of metadata schemas
and controlled vocabularies, as well as specific problems and decisions
that are part of building efficient, usable, and useful art information
systems. Colum Hourihane stresses the key role played by those who
analyze and index images of works of art, focusing on tools and methods
for iconographic analysis and description. Christine Sundt discusses
some of the major complexities of art information beyond and in combination
with subject analysis, exploring the challenges faced both by searchers
for art images and by those who wish to assist those searchers.
Just as every viewer brings a distinctive perspective to the viewing
of works of art, so each author brings his or her
own expertise, experience, and opinions to bear in the individual
essays in this
book. My own perspective is that the informed use
of appropriate metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies is essential
for the
creation of good art information systems. But I
also know from experience that information systems and the methods
of populating them must
be kept both practical and as simple as possible
if they are going to have any degree of success, or even be implemented
at all. Individual
institutions and projects must do what is practical
and achievable with the resources available to them, always with
the goal of serving
their various user groups. In building information
systems, projects and institutions should create a data structure
in which information
is atomized to the degree that it is compliant
with relevant standards and will enable good end-user retrieval.
When systems become overly
complex, cataloguing becomes more difficult and
inefficient, and usability both for those who are populating the
system and for those who are its intended users declines. Practical
considerations should
take precedence over theoretical analysis. Checklists,
local authorities, and any other tools that can facilitate cataloguing
and indexing
should be used as much as possible. And the importance
of training cannot be stressed enough.
The annotated list of tools, glossary, and selected bibliography
in this volume are the result of a collaborative effort on the part
of the authors and myself. We hope they provide both useful reference
tools and a common language for discussing issues and strategies
that provide access to images.
The images included in this book are taken, for the most part, from
the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and reflect to a great
degree our own research interests; therefore, visual examples of
non-Western art are lacking. But the standards, tools, and methods
we discuss can be used to describe any type of art, architecture,
or material culture.
Finally, I would like to stress the human element in the work of
describing and providing access to images of works of art. Information
technology is an integral part of the way in which we work today,
but without the art-historical knowledge, intelligence, and experience
of art information professionals, it would be impossible to enable
users to find the images they seek.
Murtha Baca
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