Reading list, 14 September 2019

Wow, I have a lot of reading to catch up on ...

Daniel Weiss, Adam Weinberg and other museum leaders speak out following the fallout from the resignation of the Whitney’s vice chairman and the ongoing Sackler affair - for The Art Newspaper

There was “next to nothing” about Muslims in the Brooklyn Historical Society’s century-old archives. Now there are 54 oral histories, which serve as the foundation for a new art exhibition.

The Amsterdam Museum will no longer use the descriptor "Golden Age" to for the 17th century:

The Golden Age occupies an important place in Western historiography that is strongly linked to national pride. But positive associations with the term such as prosperity, peace, opulence and innocence do not cover the charge of historical reality in this period. The term ignores the many negative sides of the 17th century such as poverty, war, forced labour and human trafficking.

The Wellcome Collection's new long-term exhibition Being Human has been designed "accessibility first" and has garnered a lot of well deserved press: No art lover left behind: how galleries are finally welcoming disabled people (Guardian); Is This the World’s Most Accessible Museum? (NYT);

A British survey shows that four in ten cultural organisations pay their junior front of house staff less than a living wage.

Lorraine Boissonneault for Slate: The Complicated Decisions That Come With Digitizing Indigenous Languages

Look, I haven't engaged with the Jeffrey Epstein thing at all so just dropping this in here for future reference: Martin Levine, Must Modern Philanthropy Be So Corrosive?, on Epstein's philanthropic relationship with MIT.

The Ford Foundation's president Darren Walker in conversation with artnet's Andrew Goldstein: ‘We Don’t Need to Demonize Wealthy People’: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker on the Unnerving Aftermath of the Warren Kanders Protests

ICOM shrugged off the vote on the proposed new definition of a "museum": Should Art Museums Be More or Less Ideological? After Pushback, a Gathering of Museum Leaders Refuses to Address the Question

Suse Anderson is teaching a new first-year course on museum ethics at George Washington University, and the course outline looks like a primer in contemporary museum discussions

Masses and mazes

An article on Read Write Web last week, titled I Don't Know Much About Art But I Know What's Online, has ruffled a few feathers in the English digital collection community (and also provoked some thoughtful responses).

In the RWW article, Curt Hopkins opens by stating that a digital experience of an art institution's can never replicate a physical visit. He then surveys six online collections, focusing on their comprehensiveness, the image resolution offered, and their usability.

Hopkins ends by observing

The collections of museums are making their way online, if for no other reason than they serve as a kind of advertisement. I have yet, however, to come across an outfit, small or large, whose goal was to make their entire collection, or even a substantial majority of it, available online. The few that tried did not hit the trifecta of navigational ease, resolution and information that would make it the most useful.

It was these points that got people agitated, rather than his commentary on the websites he critiqued. Clairey Ross wrote a self-titled 'rant', stating:

My work revolves around understanding what users think of online museum collections, why museums use them, their purpose their usability and god damn it, not one person I have interviewed, observed, surveyed and stalked ever suggested that an museum online collection was an ‘advertisment’ and there are several museums whose goal is to make their entire collection available online.

Frankie Roberto used the RWW article as a launch pad for thinking about what Hopkins' 'trifecta' could feel like:

When I visit an art museum, my primary experience is of wandering. I never know that much the art works, or what to expect, so I rarely have a specific destination in mind – merely just a desire to see some interesting/provoking stuff.

I think it’s this experience which is so hard to replicate online. We’re good at building web experiences which are optimised at getting users to the thing they’re after (usually information) as quickly as possible, via carefully considered navigation and relevance-optimised search. What we’re less good at is building web experiences where the user sits back and is simply entertained/amazed/enthralled by things they wouldn’t have otherwise come across.

One of the things I admire about Frankie is his ability to look at other models and use them to generate new ideas. He points to Phil Gyford's Today's Paper (an alternative - beautiful - layout of the Guardian's content) and the Guardian's own EyeWitness app for the iPad and asks how you could build on these ways of manipulating content in order to enhance the experience of looking at digital collections.

Mike Ellis is another person I admire, mostly for his willingness to cut to the heart of the matter and ask hard questions. In his post, he asks three questions:

1. Is getting your entire collection online really a good goal?
2. If you achieve that goal, how do you make it a good user experience?
3. Why do it at all?
   

With some digital collections, width is everything. Take Papers Past for example, the National Library's website providing access to digitised historical New Zealand newspapers. Users of this site care far less about speed or navigation than they do about content - the more papers digitised and the more years covered the better.

With other collections though, I wonder if focusing on a great experience with your most useful, most interesting, and most unique collection items might be a better goal?

UPDATE

An interesting comment from Mike Ellis (thanks Mike!) that I thought I'd bring up into the post:

"One thing I didn't manage to get in that post - something I'll maybe do in the future - is how I suspect this could work best. Seems to me that there should be a way of (for instance, making this up as I go along..):

1. Only digitising the 100 (or 1,000) or so "iconic" objects, and providing a huge amount of detail, photography, context, story for these;

2. Spend the rest of the time focussing resource on amending or creating Wikipedia entries

This kind of approach, (or something more thought about..) would probably maximise number of eyeballs as well as hitting the more in-depth stuff asked for by some users"

Concrete modernism

Back near the beginning of the century, when I was researching for my Masters thesis, I spent many happy hours poring over issues of Home and Building, which regularly featured articles on the visual arts alongside advice on soggy lawns, home furnishings, and knitting patterns.

Peter Tomory, the subject of my thesis (and director of the Auckland Art Gallery from 1956 to 1965) wrote a number of pieces for the journal, including a brave self-assessment of the Gallery's ambitious 1961 exhibition 'Painting in the Pacific'.

While I dutifully sifted through boxes and boxes of back issues looking for relevant articles, it was the covers and the advertisements that kept me going. This was when I first noticed the strong connection between smoking and modernism - a casually held cigarette seemed essential for selling everything from linoleum to copper piping.

Home and Building resurfaced in my visual memory a wee while ago, when I spotted this post about Concrete Quarterly by Aegir Hallmundur on his blog Minstry of Type (a must for design-related goodness).



The exquisite covers immediately brought Home and Building to mind. Concrete Quarterly has been in production since 1947, and is still being published - you can download the back issues as PDFs.



Home and Building was published between 1937 and 1998. The redoubtable New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has digitised a small number of back issues in a test project in collaboration with the Architecture and Design Library at Victoria University of Wellington. The NZETC has also digitised the Architectural Centre's Design Review from 1948 to 1954. Happy scanning.

Web muster

Just over 900 of Vincent van Gogh's letters have been digitised and put online in Vincent van Gogh: The Letters. A digital accompaniment to a print publication, the letters are fully transcribed, translated and searchable.

The strongest feature of the site is that way that you can view a single letter in multiple ways - an image of a page, the transcription, the original line breaks, the English translation, the editors' notes, and related works. You can also easily compare and contrast, as shown below.



There are amazingly detailed notes about the publication (down to the insertion of missing commas) and some solid info about the technology behind the site.

And in other web news: changes to the display of MoMA's permanent collection (including frame removal).

The Besties: Best Online Resources (local edition)

You can't go past the Auckland Art Gallery here. While their website is starting to look a bit geriatric, I think the online collection and the digitised resources are the best in NZ.

Word on the digitisation grapevine is that the AAG will be releasing a new digital product next year, which will add wiki-style commenting to a heritage resource.

Also worthy of mention:

Christchurch Art Gallery with their growing collection of Audio on Demand.

Te Papa's new mini-exhibition sites are nice to look at, and the Zoomify is cute. At the moment though there's no sectional nav (not even breadcrumbs) and you can get foisted out unexpectedly into TP's main site, which is a bit disconcerting. And this leaves me wordless.

Design Review - now online

Maybe I'm a paper-sniffing library geek, but I was thrilled to find out that the NZETC has digitised all 29 issues of the 1940s-50s journal, the New Zealand Design Review.



It's transcribed, text-searchable, and has scans of each page, including the ads, some of which are to die for. Your modernist soul will delight in:

E Mervyn Taylor on letterhead design

Two houses by Ernst Plischke

Would a flat suit you?

A house in Stokes Valley - Bill Toomath

From the archives

You've got to admire a publication which puts art reviews from 1985 online.

Here's the New York Magazine on Gretchen Albrecht, Stephen Bambury, Jeffrey Harris, Richard Killeen, James Ross and Philip Trusttum, who were showing at 22 Wooster Gallery in SoHo in January 1985.

The article is right above another lovely piece of arcana: tough times with the clerical staff at the Whitney, after the uppity staff went off and got themselves unionised.

Your digital bookshelf

Who needs archives when you have the internet?

Auckland Art Gallery has digitised its exhibition catalogues from 1954 to 1969. This includes the 1963 McCahon / Woollaston retrospective, and the Contemporary New Zealand Painting series. The catalogues are available in PDF format

The AAG has also digitised the Auckland Art Gallery Quarterly from 1956-19789. The Quarterlies are available as PDFs, with HTML versions available for issues up to no. 25. You can search by issue, or by using the index of artists.

Christchurch City Libraries, along with the Christchurch Art Gallery, have digitised a number of Cantabrian resources, including The Group catalogues from 1927-1977. The Robert McDougall Art Gallery : a profile of the Art Gallery of the City of Christchurch, 1932-1982 is also available as a PDF from the CCL site.

An added bonus, Una Platt's Nineteenth century New Zealand artists : a guide & handbook is available as a PDF on the CCL site. The book is also available as HTML and as Microsoft Reader e-book on the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre site.

On the Christchurch Art Gallery site you can also access the Robert McDougall Art Gallery Survey publication, from 1971-1978, and the Bulletin, from 1979 to the present. All PDFs.

And finally, the National Library has digitised Te Ao Hou / The New World, a bilingual magazine published by the Māori Affairs Department from 1952-1956.

Happy online researching!

Digital do-gooder

My new-New Year's resolution / proof I'm really committed to my job: I'm going to become a volunteer proof-reader with Distributed Proofreaders, on online organisation set up to assist with the digitisation of books for Project Gutenberg.

One of the reasons I'm doing this - apart from the goodness of my heart - is that the digitisation of the books is being done using OCR (optical character recognition). We're running a project here at work using OCR to convert millions (well, million) of TIF files of pages of historical newspapers into fully text-searchable pages. I think/hope this will provide an interesting insight.