
Digitizing Initiatives
Digitizing initiatives
not intended for profit
It is widely acknowledged
that the Internet has changed forever the way we work together, teach and
learn, talk to each other, as well as find, use, create and share information. -- Paul Conway

(above: Caroline A. Lord, Woman
with Geraniums, c. 1900, oil on canvas, on loan to the Cincinnati Art
Museum from the City School District of the City of Cincinnati. Public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons*)
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- Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO) advocates placing online -- where feasible --
all films, audio recordings and paper-printed texts relating to American representational art.
A goal of TFAO is to place on its site all available paper-printed texts
within its field of interest that are not otherwise freely available on
other sites through the efforts of other nonprofit or commercial organizations.
In its site's unique content pages, cross references and links are made
to exhibition catalogues, articles, online videos, DVD and VHS videos,
online audio, illustrated audio, and other compilations for further study.
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- Through its publication Resource
Library, TFAO
offers a complimentary online publishing service to copyright holders of
paper-printed texts. Resource Library's pages on scholarly texts from institutions
and scholarly text from private sources describe its benefits to both the public and its sources
of content. Resource Library does not charge copyright holders to
publish texts and offers the texts for online reading free of charge. The
texts may be "in copyright" or with expired copyrights and may
be "in print" or out-of-print. Resource Library secures
permission from copyright holders prior to digitizing and publishing their
texts online.
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- TFAO's special
projects initiative and conversion
of analog text to digital files and online publication of scholarly texts grant program describe other essay discovery, permissions
and processing programs in addition to the ongoing services of Resource
Library. Other current grant programs
for museums include video
and audio initiatives and transcription
of podcast files to text and online publication.
TFAO seeks to discover and share with institutions further avenues for
digitizing information and services.
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- Please see TFAO's page Acquisition
and deselection of content for information on
other initiatives including Wikipedia.
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- Digital Commons repositories are a means by which the public may access
exhibition catalogues, brochures, didactic wall panels, extended object
labels, checklists, marketing materials, object images, and other information
relating to specific exhibitions hosted by member institutions. The organization's
website says as of February, 2014 that "Digital Commons is the leading
hosted institutional repository software for universities, colleges, law
schools, and research centers."
- Examples of art museums associated with Digital
Commons are: Bellarmine Museum of Art, Frost Art Museum, La Salle University
Art Museum and Sheldon Museum of Art.
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- The Internet
Archive was founded in 1996 to to build an Internet
library. It offers from the JSTOR Early Journal Content collection as
of 2013 over 1,600 pre-1923 articles
from the journal Art and Progress. Most
articles relate to American art.
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- Online
Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) is a a
joint effort by the Getty Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum. It is
a five year initiative that brings together the resources of nine art museums.
It endeavors to create ways to incorporate, beyond the usual static artwork
images and text of print publications, audio and video into online catalogues,
plus other features. The OSCI site says that through the efforts of the
participants in the project: "...a completely new model of scholarly
publishing is coming into focus, one in which robust future-focused technologies
make comprehensive scholarly information available in beautifully rendered
formats for devices as varied as iPads and dual-screen workstations. Readers
will be able to study detailed images of artworks online, overlay them
with conservation documentation, discover scholarly essays in easy-to-read
formats, take notes in the margins that can be stored for later use, and
export citations to their desktops. Moreover, the system of software tools
under development is being designed to be both flexible and replicable
so it can support a broad variety of other collections-based publication
by museums into the future."
- As of February, 2013 a 50 page 2012 interim report
titled Moving Museum Catalogues Online is available for download
in .pdf format on the Getty Foundation's website. The participating musuems
plan to publish scholarly catalogues on their websites. It is not clear
to what extent catalogues will be available without charge to viewers.
- An article titled "The
Transition to Online Scholarly Catalogues,"
published online in 2011 by Museums and the Web 2011 by Nik Honeysett of
the J. Paul Getty Museum, discusses aspects of OSCI.
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- The Universal Library,
hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, is conducting a project named the
Million Book Digital Library to digitize principally "in copyright,"
although
out-of-print, books on many topics. The
books are free to read on the Web. Persons who wish to have collections
of books digitized and have the texts placed on the Web may contact Denise
Troll Covey at troll@andrew.cmu.edu. A project proposal by Raj Reddy, University Professor,
School of Computer Science, and Gloriana St. Clair, University Librarian,
concerning The Million Book project states "NCES reports that 84 percent
of libraries around the country are open between 60 and 80 hours a week.
This digital library would be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and
365 days a year for a total of 168 hours a week, over twice the time most
libraries are open. More than one individual will be able to use the same
book at the same time. Thus, popular works will not be checked out and
thus unavailable to others." Likewise, the texts available on the
Web via TFAO-dl may be accessed by more than one reader at a time at all
times during the year.
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Project
Gutenberg (PG) is an Internet producer
of free electronic books (eBooks or eTexts). PG states that the "Project
Gutenberg philosophy is to make information, books and other materials
available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers,
programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search." TFAO
has canvassed hundreds of organizations and individuals to advise them
of the PG service. TFAO encourages readers to consider PG as an option
to have books digitized. Readers may send information on American art
history books with expired copyrights directly to PG. Project Gutenberg
announced in October, 2003 that it had reached its long-standing goal of
releasing 10,000 free titles to the Internet, and that it would soon also
release a DVD of most of these titles.
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- ManyBooks.net
provides free on-demand download of public domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg
and other sources. It has features such as cover art and other information
that might be found in an online bookstore. As of February, 2013, two out
of 108 art titles in English were devoted to American art.
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- In February 2005, the Smithsonian
Archives of American Art received an award of
$3.6 million to dramatically increase the accessibility of its resources.
The grant is used to fund a comprehensive, five-year program to digitize
a substantial cross-section of the Archives' most important holdings, including
the papers of a highly diverse range of artists and arts-related figures
from the eighteenth century to today. At the end of the program, an estimated
1.6 million digital files will be available to the public. The papers of
artists and other archival collections in the Archives of American Art
are now available
online. These collections, containing letters,
postcards, sketches, exhibition records, diaries, and other unique documents,
are a rich and valuable resource for the study of American art and history.
Over one hundred collections are scheduled for digitization over the next
five years.
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- Making of America is a digital library of texts
concerning American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
MOA is a collaborative effort between Cornell University and the University
of Michigan consisting of a collection of of out-of-copyright books and
journals. Cornell
University's MOA collection provides access to
907,750 pages (as of November, 2004) in 267 monograph volumes and over
100,000 journal articles from 22 journals. As of September 1, 2004, the
University of Michigan
MOA collection contained 3,322,061 pages from
8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles. Pages were first digitized as
600 dpi TIFF images, followed by optical character recognition of the TIFF
images. Many pages have open access while others are restricted. Full text
keyword search is available for both collections.
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Learner.org provides life long learning on the Web. Several digitized
full motion online videos focus on American art in the A World of Art:
Work in Progress series. A World of Art is a video instructional
series on art appreciation for college and high school classrooms and adult
learners. Each program in this art appreciation series is devoted to a
contemporary artist who takes one or more works of art from start to finish.
Broadband video is streamed via Windows Media Player. Each show is 30 minutes
in length.
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- Examples are:
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- -- Lorna Simpson: Lorna Simpson, photographer,
explores the ambiguous terrain connecting words and images in large-scale
landscapes silkscreened on felt.
- -- Hung Liu: Hung Liu, painter, comments
on traditional Chinese society as she paints a series of works on the Last
Emperor and his court.
- -- Beverly Buchanan: Beverly Buchanan,
photographer, sculptor, and painter, focuses on an important symbol of
rural Southern culture: the shack.
- -- Judy Baca: Judy Baca, painter and activist
known for her mile-long mural in Los Angeles depicting Chicano history,
works on two public art projects in Southern California.
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- An opportunity exists for PBS affiliates, museums
and other non-profit owners of VHS/DVD programs to digitize them for online
presentation. A list of videos for consideration are at TFAO's videos section within
catalogues.
Local public television stations have
recording equipment to facilitate multimedia and can be approached by museums
for assistance in digitizing museums' video programs.
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- P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of
the Museum of Modern Art in New York, launched in 2004 WPS1, a Web-based radio
station devoted to the arts. WPS1 also served as an audio digital library.
MOMA received from the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture a set of CD-Rs
containing artists' lectures digitized from analog recordings of Skowhegan's
artist faculty. The lectures were originally intended for use by the School's
students and other artists. Through a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation
the lectures were digitized and placed on DR-Rs, then disseminated to institutions
including MOMA. WPS1 sought permissions from the artists to have selected
archived lectures broadcast on the Web. Please see Wikipedia's entry on
WPS1.
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Digitizing initiatives with revenue
and profit aspects
- For information on digitizing initiatives with
revenue and profit aspects please click
here.
Also see:
TFAO Free Online Digital Library
Digital Libraries for Museums
Digital Lbraries for Art Dealer Associations
Digitizing Initiatives with Profit Aspects
The eBook future
Related Non-Profit Organizations
Methods and Costs
Notes
Survey of Online Exhibition Catalogues,
Brochures, Gallery Guides and Related Materials
"American
Art History and Digital Scholarship: New Avenues of Exploration" at Archives of American Art, November 15 & 16,
2013, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC, from the Terra Foundation for American Art Web page linking to audio
and video resources. Accessed October, 2015.
Notes on copyright and the public domain:
Online
Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), a joint
effort by the Getty Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Museum, published in
2012 a 50 page interim report titled Moving Museum Catalogues Online.
It is available, as of February 2103, for download in .pdf format on the
Getty Foundation's website. Pages 37 through 42 of the report contain Appendix
2, titled "Intellectual Property Rights." Appendix 2 was authored
by Maureen Whalen, Associate General Counsel of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
She writes about issues related to online catalogues and includes a draft
model form intellectual property rights permission request.
Wikipedia has a page on the Copyright
Term Extension Act of 1998, which says as of 2/26/13:
- The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA)
of 1998 extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. Since
the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author
plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship. The Act
extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works
of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication,
whichever endpoint is earlier.[1] Copyright protection for works published
prior to January 1, 1978, was increased by 20 years to a total of 95 years
from their publication date.
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- This law, also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or as the Mickey Mouse Protection
Act,[2] effectively "froze" the advancement date of the public
domain in the United States for works covered by the older fixed term copyright
rules. Under this Act, additional works made in 1923 or afterwards that
were still protected by copyright in 1998 will not enter the public domain
until 2019 or afterward (depending on the date of the product) unless the
owner of the copyright releases them into the public domain prior to that.
Unlike copyright extension legislation in the European Union, the Sonny
Bono Act did not revive copyrights that had already expired. The Act did
extend the terms of protection set for works that were already copyrighted,
and is retroactive in that sense. However, works created before January
1, 1978, but not published or registered for copyright until recently,
are addressed in a special section (17 U.S.C. § 303) and may remain
protected until the end of 2047. The Act became Pub.L. 105298 on October
27, 1998.
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- 1. ^ U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 1: Copyright
Basics, pp. 5-6
- 2. ^ Lawrence Lessig, Copyright's First Amendment,
48 UCLA L. Rev. 1057, 1065 (2001)
Return to Digital Libraries and Initiatives
Links to sources of information outside
of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration.
Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained
in these and all other web sites. Information from linked sources may be
inaccurate or out of date. TFAO neither recommends or endorses these referenced
organizations. Although TFAO includes links to other web sites, it takes
no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other
sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over them. For more information
on evaluating web pages see TFAO's General
Resources section in Online
Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.
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