Visual Resources Update October 2021

Visual Resources Update October 2021

Many of you have probably seen the job posting for a Digital Project Specialist. Since 2015 Visual Resources has launched several digital projects. VR is increasingly serving in an advisory and exploratory role for faculty and graduate students looking to create projects online. The cataloguing experience of VR, as well as our familiarity with diverse visual material, can be a great help to projects involving images/works from any collection. It is our hope that this new appointment can leverage our knowledge in combination with their own skills to support a departmental hub for digital exhibits and projects.

Fragments of ancient pottery laid out on a black surface
Teaching collection pottery sherds from the Levant now available in Visual Resources

VR received a teaching collection of Levantine pottery sherds from the estate of A. Orley Swartentruber who obtained them from R.B.Y. Scott. Prof. Scott was an Old Testament scholar in the Department of Religion from 1955 to 1968. The collection includes pieces from locations such as Jerash and Amman. Please let us know if you would like to use this as a teaching collection, we would be happy to provide it to you or any other department on campus.

We are also making available another collection consisting of marble and stone pieces, believed to be assembled by Amanda Claridge with specimens from Richard Stillwell. The collection is currently in Prof. Holzman’s office while we arrange better storage.

Lantern Slide Projection

We were happy to provide lantern slide projection in ART207 and would like to remind everyone that we retained many lantern slides and only deaccessioned those that were either images from publications, poor quality, or of prolifically available views. Please reach out if you are looking for anything specific!

INTERESTING PROJECTS AND RESOURCES:

A terrific resource for historical sources from collections not always accessible through major catalogs: The ‘Decolonised’ Digital Archive

The Digital Image:  from the International Journal for Digital Art History and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), this publication “combines projects from a multiperspectival point of view and addresses the central role that the image plays in the process of the digitization of knowledge in theory and practice.”

You can now make your own online British Library Exhibit with iiif!

From the University of Edinburgh, MINDSHIFT: Confronting a colonial collection

The Butler Syria transcription project made the From the Page blog!