library of primitive art

Le Musee du quai Branly up close

Cliquez pour agrandir -- Click to enlarge
From the photoblog Over the Rainbow

Digital Asset Management at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Even though RLG does a fine job of publicizing its own efforts, it never hurts to highlight important articles -- particularly when they come out of your own 'shop'. The most recent issue of their RLG DigiNews (Dec. 2006) features Why Digital Asset Management? A Case Study, by Susan Chen and Michael Jenkins, both of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The article is a comprehensive overview of the decision making that surrounded the establishment of a museum-wide Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, now christened Met Images, and the concomitant reorganization of museum resources required to implement and sustain such a system. Of particular interest for an insider is learning what steps were necessary to get institutional buy-in from all the parties affected -- senior management, curatorial and research staff, and the image support staff.

One intriguing assertion appears in a box-out two-thirds of the way down the article, reproduced here on the left, in a section headed Cataloguing. (Evidently the image community clings fast to that interstitial 'u'.) When I first read it I thought the suggestion was that cataloging works of art was significantly different from cataloging 'sneakers or pickup trucks'. On its face this seems eminently arguable. Some institutions have wasted much time and energy in developing elaborate and idiosyncratic DIY systems that try to mimic pre-existing cataloging paradigms (with all their inherent flaws) rather than taking advantage of systems that employ industry-standard input and output.

But in the context of this section of the article, the statement is only meant as a caution: The complexity of cataloging works of art may not be sufficiently recognized by DAM vendors in the design of their products. The authors seem optimistic that "tools will be developed that are more appropriate to the needs of museums, libraries, and archives." From my perspective I hope that the tools are both appropriate to the museum's needs and practically implementable.

Has MLA seen the light?

To follow up on my Quo vadis? post regarding the growth of new media scholarly publication, Jim Retting offers promising ruminations at his Twilight Librarian. Jim sifts through the Modern Language Association's recently released Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion to locate the following recommendation:

4. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.

Jim recognizes clearly what escapes someone like myself, safely beyond the exigencies of academic tenure and promotion: No faculty member will consider exploiting the new media for publishing without the promise that it will be tangibly acknowledged.

It's too early to pop the cork on the champagne. But Jim makes an excellent point:

It will open new opportunities for collaboration with humanities faculty who turn to librarians and educational technologists for assistance and guidance. Librarians and educational technologists can even form partnerships to help senior faculty learn about the role new media can play in humanities scholarship so that these faculty will be able to make truly informed judgments about their younger colleagues' work.

 

Tracking open-access alternatives to traditional print publishing

A recent post on the blog Material World brought home to me just how quickly open-access publication has arrived, even in our often remote corner of the academic world. The post as it was conceived, illustrated and with scholarly apparatus (including an author's note), is likely to satisfy a research need just as much as any succinct journal article. It would seem that the appearance of the scholarly blog post heralds a certain 'coming of age' of the weblog.

Time off for good behavior?

If anyone has been searching this blog for my latest library pearls of wisdom (cough, cough) or wondered why their Bloglines entry for LOPA has remained unchanged, I freely admit I haven't been spending much time behind the desk lately. In fact, not even on the same continent. In an effort to both mark and avoid that imaginary personal milestone that is fifty, I've taken a few weeks off to visit South America (solo, above left) and Africa (to visit Kiki, above). And mirabile dictu scarcely a single library visit during either of the trips.

But tomorrow morning it's back aboard a Transatlantic jetliner and after a brief domestic excursion to Washington, D.C., I should be back at work just in time to take Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday off. That out of the way, it looks live several uninterrupted months (except Christmas and New Year's, of course) of back-breaking, nose-to-the-grindstone library work for me. So don't give up hope just yet!

Keeping busy for fun and non-profit

FOR THOSE FEW BUT DEDICATED READERS: My apologies for not posting here sooner. Though I've had little to show for it in this space, I haven't been idle.

Props to Garrett Hungerford of Library Zen for introducing me to Google Co-Op, one of those many Google spin-offs (or outright purchase? Dunno, my back was turned), now with Create Your Own Search Engine. (Sounds like laundry product ads from my childhood.) Garrett's adaptation to compile a search engine for LIS bogs, LISZEN, is a masterful case of killer app -- the very sort of thing that at its best sets one to thinking.

One of my less whiz-bang responsibilities at work (until now) has been selecting titles for the library. We have few vendors who can match our narrow and specialized scope and broad spectrum of publishing venues with their approval plans. That puts a premium on finding titles on your own in order to guarantee the fullest coverage. Over time I have compiled a monster bookmark with the url's of all the publishers, trade and academic, putting out titles in our subject areas. A great start, but a pretty dull to plow through. Each publisher insists on designing its web site differently, providing for different search strategies (if any), arrangement and groupings of products, file formats (including the ever frustrating pdf), and page displays. (I feel that by now I could give an excellent presentation on how not to design a publisher's web site.)

Along comes Google Co-Op, and 'twas then the penny dropped. If I gathered all the root url's from the publishers' web sites, I could search across all their pages for keywords as I would any Google search. It's no substitute for hunting down the new titles one by one, but it could certainly cover most of the pages I'd need on a regular basis.

The mechanics of working in GC-O were surprisingly easy (with a few blunders along the way). I was even able to strip out the annoying advertising by attesting to being a 501(c)(3) institution. A few more deft taps and I could drop my test search engine into this blog. (That's it under SEARCH ENGINES at the bottom of the left column.) For now I've only managed an engine for the academic presses; I may still do one for trade publishers (if I sense a need for different keyword strategies) or fold it into the existing one.

It is worth pointing out that GC-O defaults to root url's (i.e., www.site.com). Web sites with subsites (subsite.site.com) need to be individually specified. At this early stage I haven't yet taken advantage of Google Marker, a handy way to gather url's to populate your search engines.

This particular application will probably spend most of its time behind the scenes. What's cool is that this also comes at the very moment that we are dismantling our Intranet pages and fashioning wiki pages for the same information. My colleague is working to transfer a key reference page featuring the web addresses for art and ethnography museums worldwide. The logical next step is a publicly-available search engine crossing all these museum web sites. That should find its way into the Goldwater Blog -- stay tuned.

Lest you think I spent all my time with my nose to the grindstone, I also took time out for Hallowe'en (left) and to visit a cemetery, but that's the stuff of another post on another blog.

Correcting an omission

I've been back for a week now, after a delightful hiatus in the Southern Hemisphere, only to discover that the library world has spun on and forward without me. A little hard to regain the grip I had on the fast pace of change in our community. And this knowing that another absence is looming next month.

So a perfect time to look backward, I guess, on someone I've had reason to think about a lot this year: John Cotton Dana. My appreciation of Dana was rekindled by my distinguished colleagues Bill Dane (distinguished in every sense of the word) of Newark Public Library, and William Peniston of the Newark Museum. This year Bill co-curated a wonderful and wondrous exhibition at Newark PL celebrating Dana on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. It was Bill's 'next-door neighbor', William, who posted an email announcement of the symposium entitled "Civic Life in Newark: The Legacy of John Cotton Dana," held July 13, 2006 at Newark PL.

Touring the exhbition and listening to the symposium talks, I was struck by Dana's relentless pursuit of innovation, indifference to the status quo, unapologetic pride in his profession, and tireless advocacy for his patrons.  A subsequent read of Dana's Library Primer (3d ed., 1903) revealed just how prescient and timeless his ideas are. For all his mental animation, he may not have been easy to work for (though legend has it he was doted on by his mostly female employees), but the significance of his accomplishments is indisputable.

As delightful as the Librarian Trading Card group on flickr! is, there's a notable lack of retrospection in the collection. My memories of trading cards turned on notions of comparable value from one to another. Was a Willie Mays more valuable than a Mickey Mantle? (To me, perhaps, but those Yankees always seem to bring the highest dollar.) And a Honus Wagner more than all of them? Its too early to assess the worth of my contemporaries, but these library giants of the past: Now they're worth something!

Taking a breather

I will be taking time out from this listening post to kick back and enjoy the arrival of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, in a city of bookstores steeped in the spirit of that literary lion and librarian, Jorge Luis Borges:

The other employees immediately forbade Borges from cataloging more than 100 books each day, a task which would take him about one hour. The rest of his days he would spend in the basement of the library, writing articles and short stories.

(And to think he never won the Nobel Prize for Literature or for Librarianship.) I also expect to see just a few museums, eat and drink a little, and stroll the streets of this walker's paradise.

Until I get back, keep your eyes on the other blogs I'm involved with.

[photo source]

A Note About the New Banner

Making Tappa (native cloth), 1890s (sepia photo)
Image source

Having just cobbled together a banner on behalf of Ross for this new blog of his, I thought I should post a note regarding its origin. The background image (Making Tappa, above) comes from The Bridgeman Art Library, which describes itself as

the world's leading source of fine art with images from over eight thousand collections and twenty nine thousand artists. We represent museums, galleries and artists throughout the world by providing a central source of fine art for image users

Aside from working with the world's museums to provide great images for scholarly use (etc.), there are other reasons for mentioning The Bridgeman Library, namely the ruling (c. 1999) that photographs of images from the public domain are not copyrightable. Referred to affectionately as "Bridgeman", this is considered a landmark ruling for fair use and digital reproduction of images.

See also: Wikipedia entry: Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.

and:
Recent Lessons from the Courts: The Changing Landscape of Copyright in a Digital Age
by Brett I. Miller, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP (RLG DigiNews, April 15, 2000, Vol.4, no.2)

excerpt:

To the extent that Bridgeman stands for the broad proposition that no copyright interest can be claimed in a digital reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art, the case unquestionably undercuts one of the most important weapons available to institutions to police the unauthorized copying and distribution of digital image collections. However, the Bridgeman holding concerns only reproductions of two-dimensional works in the public domain. This leaves reproductions of three-dimensional objects - which arguably involve a greater degree of "originality" by virtue of the selection of backdrop, lighting, perspective and other creative choices involved in their creation - still subject to copyright. Moreover, Bridgeman does nothing to impact or undermine the separate and independent copyright interest that institutions may have in digital image collections as "compilations." Compilations are works formed by the collection and assembling of pre-existing elements that, standing alone, may not be subject to copyright protection. Accordingly, although Bridgeman may affect an institution's ability to claim copyright in reproductions of particular images, the case does not undermine the copyright interest an institution may have in the selection, arrangement and coordination of the particular elements comprising a given digital image collection.

Furthermore:

While Bridgeman represents the first judicial pronouncement on whether a digital reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art is sufficiently original for copyright protection as a threshold matter, a case decided in December of last year, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., provides critical insight into how the fair use doctrine will be applied in the digital context. The fair use doctrine is arguably the most important limitation on the rights granted to copyright owners. Fair use is a defensive claim that serves to protect third parties from liability for conduct that may otherwise constitute actionable infringement. The current federal copyright statute codifies this equitable doctrine by providing, in relevant part, that "the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . scholarship, or research is not an infringement . . ." [read on...]

Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum and its ilk

• 32 Weirdly Specific Museums (from SenseList)

I couldn't figure out which of my blogs to put this reblog in, but in the end this one won out. I guess there's something to be said about being in an encyclopedic museum ("5000 Years of Art" [emphasis added]) and not one dedicated to plumbing fixtures. There are some interesting links to follow here as well.

Credit for reblogging it to my attention goes to the quirky Museum Madness blog.