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Case Study: Art History Image Database

Featuring: Sydney University Dept of Art History & Theory
Speaking with Dr Julian Pefanis
WWW address: http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/ArtHistory/cumulus/Artsearch.html

The Background.

The Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Sydney "offers the only full service department of fine arts in any tertiary institution in New South Wales."

Initially its central discipline was the history of painting, sculpture and architecture of Europe (with some reference to Australia). Over the past few years, the Department has responded not only to radical transformations in the nature of art history itself, but to the explosion of 'visual studies' into the areas of film, television and the computer, into photography, design, costume, style and cultural studies - and has introduced the study of Aboriginal and Asian Art. [Website Welcome page accessed 20/12/04]

"We have large undergraduate and postgraduate programs offering students courses in the history of art, from cave paintings to electronic arts... The real challenge for us is to distribute images to our students via the web." comments Dr Pefanis.

The study and teaching of visual arts is constantly affected by the new technologies. The Department now offers both traditional and new competencies. Some of the careers available to Art History and Theory graduates include: Teacher, Art Historian, Art Gallery or Museum Curator, Arts Administrator, Filmmaker, Film Critic, Designer, Academic, Writer, Publisher...

The Cumulus solution.

Cumulus has enabled Dr Pefanis to manage a large quantity of images files (10,000+) into a database system where students can view, week by week, digital images of paintings, sculptures, etc. To quote Dr Pefanis, "By using Web Publisher we are able to update virtual categories of images. Cumulus' facility of generating Quicktime slide shows of selected assets, with notes displayed under the images, means that we can generate slide-shows quickly and effectively, and display them on the Web or in lectures, without ever having to re-enter data."

The Technical challenge.

Dr Pefanis added "Our challenge is to digitise a massive collection of 35mm slides (400,000+) and to organise the resulting collection into a usable database."

The Future?

"We originally chose Cumulus (in 1996) because it was the only product on the market capable of doing this on the old Mac OS. We would now choose it because it is cross-platform, stable and still relatively cheap when compared to other competing products and to custom solutions (which can run into the tens of thousands)."

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Art History Image Database

Search screen for the Image Database.
The link displays the organisation & slide show setup for the Art History lectures (warning: large images).

Quote: "Cumulus has passed the test of time - it is dependable and with each iteration, keeps up-to-date with rapidly evolving operating systems and metadata standards."

 

Technical Platform