>> I am writing a brief article on METS for RLG, and have been asked by
the
>> editorial board "who is using METS and why?" Good question. If you
don't
>> mind revealing yourselves to a wider world, can you send me an email
with a
>> sentence or two about how you will or might use METS?
Hi,
Hope this is also not too late for your article - and perhaps this will
serve as an introduction to the larger METS list and other users of our
exploration of METS for museums, moving image, and the arts. A summary
of our project is below. Thanks!
Richard Rinehart
---------------
Digital Media Director, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
---------------
Instructor, Department of Art Practice
art.berkeley.edu
---------------
University of California, Berkeley
ArialAccess to Alternative Art Forms
--- This project will use technology to increase access to art
collections, specifically types of works which represent artistic
diversity and are currently under-represented in museum online access
projects. These include collections of performance art, artist books,
installations, audio/video works, Asian scroll paintings, and digital
art. The collaborative project will develop standards for presenting
such works in an online environment and disseminate findings of this
model project for the arts community through journal articles, website,
and professional conferences.
There are currently projects in which museums or museum consortia
provide un-precedented access to art collections via the Internet.
These projects are successfully providing access to standard art forms
such as: paintings, prints, photographs, and to a lesser extent,
sculpture. These art forms demand a fairly simple mode of access
online; a label description next to a thumbnail image of the work. A
larger size image is provided by clicking. However, these projects
rarely if ever provide access to alternative art forms because
additional difficult challenges must be answered. How does a museum
provide access to every page of an artist book in a way that is easy to
navigate online and understand as a book? How does one include text
transcriptions of each page image to allow searching and access for the
blind? How does one represent all the components of an installation or
performance so that each can be searched, then brought together for
viewing on a web page as one work? How can one present an Asian scroll
painting so that each section is detailed enough for research, yet
allows the viewer to 'scroll' through the entire work online? How can
film archives provide access to video which viewers can search scene by
scene? How can one retain the part-to-whole relationship of complex
works in an online environment?
Most importantly, how does a museum do all this cost-effectively and
scaleable across institutions so that the same method can be applied by
partners in museum consortia projects to all art forms? Answering these
questions will help provide scholars and the public access to art in
all media from museums around the nation, representing the diversity of
artistic practice and resulting in richer scholarship and enjoyment.
BAM has experience as managing museum for the consortia "Museums & the
Online Archive of California" in which BAM provided access to every
page and text transcriptions of 60 artist books by conceptual artist
Theresa Cha, using a combination of linked standards: EAD (descriptive
data) -> MOA2 (digital object structural data) -> TEI (page
transcripts). In this proposed 2-year project also, BAM will work
collaboratively, building on existing standards and practice. METS
hopes to answer many of the above questions for complex digital library
collections. BAM will explore the possibility of extending the METS
standard to museum and art collections. BAM will deliver the entire
Theresa Cha Conceptual Art Archive (artist books, video, audio,
performance) and the Marshall Collection of Chinese hand-scrolls on the
BAM website.