BWR: Collaborating to Document the World's Built Environment - Carole Ann Fabian, Director, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Your Paintings: The UK's Entire Public Oil Paintings Collection Goes Online For The World To See - Andrew Ellis, Director, The Public Catalogue Foundation
The Getty Scholars' Workspace: Building a Collaborative Online Environment for Research and Publication - Murtha Baca, Head, Digital Art History Access, Getty Research Institute
The Creator as Cataloger: Shared Shelf and Faculty Collections - Vickie O'Riordan, University of California San Diego Library
Moderator: Caroline Caviness, Implementation Manager, ARTstor
Art librarians, visual resources curators, and researchers now operate in a networked, user-centric environment. As a result, end-user collaboration is essential. It provides us with a much broader base of knowledge, ensures that the collections we build are relevant and useful, and helps us, more generally, to keep pace with the larger needs of our communities in libraries, museums, and other research institutions. The question, then-and the challenge-is how to harness the knowledge that lies in these user communities. To do so on a large scale requires collaboration between institutions, and on a smaller scale it also means that we must find a way to leverage the technologies and tools available to us. In this session, Carole Ann Fabian will outline the large-scale multi-institutional collaboration of the Built Works Registry Project (BWR), which brings together the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, ARTstor, and the Getty Research Institute in the effort to build open sharable data resources for cultural heritage objects. As a networked, distributed environment, BWR will allow contributors from throughout the global community to participate in the development and maintenance of this community-generated resource. Andrew Ellis, Director of Britain's Public Catalogue Foundation, will speak about Your Paintings, a partnership with the BBC to document and photograph all the oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom - over 200,000 works - and involve the public in tagging them. Murtha Baca will discuss the development of Getty Scholars' Workspace, an online digital art history tool for researchers to work collaboratively for research and publication purposes. And Vickie O'Riordan will describe University of California, San Diego Library's efforts to engage users in contributing data to their own archival collections through cataloging and annotation in a web-based environment using Shared Shelf.