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: Samuel Lancaster Gerry, Old
Man of the Mountains near Profile House, White Mts., 1886, oil on canvas,
61 x 48 inches, The Sullivan Museum and History Center. 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.
(above: Selden Connor Gile,
Still Life with Trees and Mountain, 1919, oil on canvas, 22.2
x 27.2 inches, Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery (1999). Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons*)
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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