open access – ARLIS/NA Multimedia & Technology Reviews

June 2025

June - 2025June - 2026 Matthew Garklavs

We’re pleased to announce the release of the June 2025 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews (MTR), now available online.

This issue explores the timely and resonant theme of Preserving Cultural Heritage, a topic MTR has addressed in depth across previous issues. We invite you to explore the current reviews by following the links in the images below or by using the DOI link provided.

You can also browse the full archive of our reviews on the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

As part of this theme, we’re highlighting a few past reviews that remain especially relevant. Here are some honorable mentions we encourage you to revisit:

Digital Benin
Mapping Philippine Material Culture
Missouri Remembers, Artists in Missouri through 1951
¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
Visualizing the Virus

Archive of Destruction

Reviewed by: Bridget O’Keefe

The Archive of Destruction is an idiosyncratic digital repository that presents histories of public art and narratives around the concept of destruction. The creators characterize the resource as a global collection of modern and contemporary artwork, showcasing narratives of ‘vulnerability, interference, rage, fear, boredom, and love. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/0x8h0-gs125

Cultural gems

Reviewed by: Campbell Garland

Begun in 2018, Cultural gems functions as a map application mapping out monuments, historical sites, and cultural institutions within the European Union. This site is run by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, an organization focused on promoting scientific research and collaboration. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/bgj5v-ee815

Cultures in Crisis

Reviewed by: Carol Ng-He

Culture in Crisis is a free digital portal developed by the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) that records heritage protection projects from around the world. Launched in December 2019, the portal is considered to be the world’s largest and most accessible database on the subject.See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/2b0es-z5879

Digital Transgender Archive

Reviewed by: Leo Krakowsky

The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is a key resource for primary research in queer and trans studies. The scope of its content and usage is timely and important in the current political climate, with applicability to a variety of library patrons. The DTA’s interface is clean and easy to understand, with impressive functionalities for search. Whether the user has an extensive background in transgender studies and topics, or is just beginning to familiarize themselves with this field, this resource’s content is offered in a clear and findable format. Particularly, the glossaries and lesson-planning guides are informative and helpful. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/p5bcv-hxm16

dPlan|ArtsReady

Reviewed by: Carrie B. Evans

dPlan|ArtsReady is an emergency preparedness tool designed to help arts and cultural heritage organizations assess their disaster response plans, identify areas for improvement, retrieve important documents, and access expert resources. The platform can serve a range of organizations and is available in free or paid versions. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/9vhvc-wsf26

Lost Art Database

Reviewed by: Stephanie Morgan

The Lost Art Database, developed by the German Lost Art Foundation, is a publicly accessible digital platform dedicated to documenting cultural property that was expropriated due to Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945, or displaced as a result of World War II. The site contains thousands of entries, divided into Search Requests for missing cultural assets and Found-Object Reports for those that may have problematic provenance. The resource serves as a tool for restitution efforts and provenance research. It is designed to benefit scholars, institutions, and individuals seeking to trace displaced objects or claim lost heritage. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/g1542-btv17

Museum of Looted Antiquities

Reviewed by: Samie Konet

The Museum of Looted Antiquities (MoLA) is a virtual gallery dedicated to the intricacies of tracing the smuggling, looting, purchase, and eventual return of antiquities repatriated since 1950. With contributions from community members–academics, lawyers, museum professionals–MoLA presents a comprehensive collection of trafficked antiquities with over 100 publicly available entries. Created to consolidate documentation tracing an artifact’s journey from its looting to eventual repatriation, MoLA aspires to preserve all records of ownership and exchange of an object for future research. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/87qxg-82r44

NuevaYorkinos

Reviewed by: Laura Michael

A crowd-sourced digital archival initiative and multimedia project, NuevaYorkinos depicts everyday histories through photographs of Caribbean and Latino people living in all five boroughs of New York. The resource consists of community submissions, and each photograph is often accompanied by a written story or memory from its owner. The purpose of this digital archive is to visually document the quotidian lives of Latinos in NYC through an overall ethos of community history and storytelling. NuevaYorkinos has a wide scope, inviting submissions of photos and videos dated before 2010 from anyone of Caribbean or Latino descent. On its website, the photographic archive is organized by borough. With over 1,000 entries, most contributions are concentrated in Manhattan, and are mainly from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Founded by Djali Brown-Cepeda and Ricardo Castañeda, this multimedia project also includes virtual exhibitions, a free educational journal called Rooted, and in-person events. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/em8xc-nvb02

Queer Zine Archive Project

Reivewed by: Alex Austin

The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) is an online blog and archive that contains fully digitized and browsable zines about queer subjects, available free to the public. Behind the digitized collection lives a physical archive in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, though the website serves as the primary mode of access. QZAP describes their intended audience as, “other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest [in] DIY publishing and underground queer communities.”
See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/83bj5-6ks19

Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online

Reviewed by: Ruth Thomas

In February of 2022, Russian forces invaded eastern Ukraine. Less than two weeks later, an initiative emerged on the internet, founded by digital historians, librarians, and archivists to protect culturally significant materials from Ukraine from being lost in the conflict: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO). With over 1,500 international volunteers contributing over 50TB of data, SUCHO aims to preserve digital and digitized records from Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions at risk of destruction due to war. With implications for those concerned with digital preservation, cultural memory, and post-custodial models of stewardship, SUCHO is a striking example of a responsive, community-driven archival initiative. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/xtg1e-ekq04

Sudan Memory

Reviewed by: Reinhardt Schuhmann

The Sudan Memory project is a digital collection that preserves and promotes cultural materials from and about Sudan. Begun in 2018, it’s a collaboration between Sudanese and international partners, including Sudaak, the National Records Office of Sudan, and King’s College London. Materials are sourced from public and private collections, many at risk of being lost due to the ongoing Sudanese civil war. Collections come from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, The National Records Office of Sudan, The Sudan Archeological Research Society, Tales of Jewish Sudan, and University of Khartoum. The platform offers a vast collection of digitized materials, including images, films, manuscripts, and oral histories, spanning over 6,000 years of Sudanese history. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/3w9qy-x9786

Talking Objects Archive

Reviewed by: Shira Atkinson

The Talking Objects Archive (TOA) includes objects from international museum collections in Europe and Africa. It is a publicly available, free resource newly launched on January 17, 2025, aimed at researchers and artists. The website is available to view in English, French and German. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/qy5s9-s7c82

December 2024

December - 2024December - 2024 Abigail Walker

We’re excited to announce the December 2024 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews. Follow the links in the images below or click the DOI link directly to read the reviews. You can find the full backlist of our reviews in the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

Landing page of the database with search filters at left. — The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

The page includes links to the archive and maps sections, plus opportunities to get involved. An engraving shows enslaved persons working as blacksmiths. — The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

The VDB home page, featuring rows of video thumbnails below a menu. — Video Data Bank Educational Streaming Platform

The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

Reviewed by: Emily Stein

The Art Collection of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture is a database presenting
the holdings of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, housed at the Louvre in Paris, in 1715 and 1781. It accumulates records for 653 fine and decorative art objects acquired by the Academy and enables the user to curate one’s own experience in French or in English, providing a singular resource for anyone researching eighteenth century French art and institutions. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/ey97w-ev378

Black Craftspeople Digital Archive

Reviewed by: Hannah Fountain

Through the power of primary source documents, the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive (BCDA)
seeks to enhance knowledge of the Black craftspeople who produced much of the American South’s prized goods and wares from 1619 on. Archival materials cited in the database are largely sourced from historic newspapers and U.S. Census data, focused on craftspeople working in South Carolina and Tennessee during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/g2k24-1t004

Common Dimensions

Reviewed by: Fiona Hibbard

Common Dimensions is a unique platform dedicated to investigating the expressions of the chair as an object of study. This primarily online resource also offers a print publication by the same name. Each modality examines what makes a chair a chair. Common Dimensions is a predominantly digital resource, and has a variety of content including a visual archive, interviews, and a collection of text. Through these resources, users are encouraged to explore the material, cultural, and political dimensions of the chair. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/7fgwq-t5321

Fragmentarium

Reviewed by: Friedrich Sarah E. Thompson

Fragmentarium is an online repository for digitized medieval manuscript fragments run by the
Manuscript Research Centre at the University of Fribourg. Unlike many other online platforms for
digitized manuscripts (like DigiVatLib, RIALFrI, or DIAMM), Fragmentarium’s focus is on manuscripts that exist only in fragmentary form, regardless of origin or host institution. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/4xn7x-hc645

Hammer Online Collections

Reviewed by: Maya Lekach

Hammer Online Collections is a free digital resource from the Hammer Museum at UCLA, which
provides public access to the museum’s diverse holdings and data. The resource provides access to
roughly 50,000 works from the museum’s collection including over 8,000 open-source images as well as video recordings of past artist programs. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/j22cs-hbd22

Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture

Reviewed by: Stephanie Morgan

The Renaissance Polychrome Sculpture databases for Tuscany, Lombardy and Piedmont, and Puglia and Basilicata hosted by Queen’s University form an extensive, ongoing project to document
Renaissance and Baroque polychrome sculptures in Italy. Each database contains high-resolution
photographs, interactive maps, and detailed information for over 600 sculptures in total, offering
scholars, educators, and students valuable open-access resources. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/nzq2t-c9882

Video Data Bank Educational Streaming Platform

Reviewed by: Garrett M. Rosenblum

The Video Data Bank Educational Streaming Platform is a new subscription-based resource from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Video Data Bank (VDB). VDB has been a leading resource for videos by and about artists since 1976. Their vast collections include over 6,000 titles of video art, experimental films, documentaries, and artist interviews, showcasing artworks from 1970 to the present. VDB’s Streaming Platform currently provides access to over 2,000 titles from this collection. See full review at: https://doi.org/10.17613/7m7jg-9xd82

June 2024

May - 2024May - 2024 Abigail Walker

We’re excited to announce the June 2024 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews. Follow the links from each title below or click the DOI link directly to read the reviews. You can find more of our reviews in the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

Artstor on Jstor

Artstor is a not-for-profit that emerged in the 1990s as a response to a need to migrate analog slide collections into digital formats. With millions of images from institutions worldwide, Artstor has content spanning cultures and periods. The Artstor website will be retired as of August 1, 2024 and the content has been migrated to the JSTOR platform. This new experience will combine cross-disciplinary content onto one platform. JSTOR offers scholarship and primary resources, which can now be discovered, saved, compared, and presented alongside Artstor’s image collections. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/08h6-nq46

BASIRA: Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art

BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art) is a cross-disciplinary resource that identifies and describes thousands of images of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 and 1600 CE. The site unites the history of art and print media during the period when moveable type and the printing press facilitated the final important advance of books as knowledge containers, and is an outstanding model of digital humanities. The site bridges visual and material culture. Analyzing the symbolic role of bound and unbound documents in paintings, it reveals how these forms amplify the act of looking by drawing the viewer’s attention to the internal life of individuals observing, holding, or reading books. At the same time, intriguingly, the site flips the usual relationship between word and image. Whereas the verbal is typically a means of analyzing the visual, here a visual form provides information about a verbal one, drawing the user’s attention to what can be learned about the materiality of the depicted books and other documents. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/f3h3-gm37

Digital Florentine Codex

Digital Florentine Codex is a unique resource for scholars at all levels, allowing free public access to and engagement with this encyclopedic work documenting Aztec life in 1500s Mexico. No doubt this resource will inspire a new audience for this remarkable historic work, and enable users to make new connections and explore this treasure trove of content in countless ways. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/zx2w-p982

Perspectives on Data

Perspectives on Data, published as a digital book by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, “explores the potentials and pitfalls of using data-oriented approaches in art, art history, and museums.” Articles focus on the choices involved in metadata creation and data translation. While especially applicable to professionals creating and managing metadata, these arguments are relevant to any user of information retrieval systems, stressing the notion that since humans shape data, data necessarily embodies human values. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/n9vf-xw05

June 2023 Issue

June - 2023August - 2023 Alexandra Provo

We’re excited to announce the June 2023 issue of Multimedia & Technology Reviews. Follow the links from each title below or click the DOI link directly to read the reviews. You can find more of our reviews in the ARLIS/NA Commons CORE Repository.

Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné

The Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné (MWCR) is a direct access online project that documents the body of work produced by Martin Wong (1946–1999), an artist who came of age on the West Coast and whose best-known paintings are of life in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The results of this collaboration between the Martin Wong Foundation, Stanford Libraries, and Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative are available without fees. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/15cv-n577

In Her Own Right: a Century of Women’s Activism, 1820-1920

In Her Own Right is a highly recommended, multi-phase collaboration of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) funded by the NEH, CLIR, Delmas Foundation, and the Gender Justice Fund. The site aggregates digitized materials from member institutions and others to tell the story of women activists in the Philly area in the 100-year period leading up to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/p5z3-ts18

MHz Curationist

MHz Curationist is a free online platform for sharing open access images of art and artifacts established by the non-profit MHz Foundation. It features 4.4 million public domain images from nine museums: The Smithsonian, Cleveland Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum, Brooklyn Museum, Statens Museum for Kunst, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and National Gallery of Art. While these digital collections may be available on each institution’s website, Curationist is an aggregate repository. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/afyf-m262

The People’s Graphic Design Archive

The People’s Graphic Design Archive is a crowd-sourced repository of, by, and for enthusiasts of graphic design started by design educator Louise Sandhaus in 2014 to make accessible a vast variety of graphic design examples. Launched in 2022, PGDA has 5,000 registered users uploading digital images of graphic design minutiae ranging from finished design projects, processes, letters, and other published and unpublished materials. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/0k99-pa37

The Index of Medieval Art

Maintained and hosted by Princeton University, the Index of Medieval Art is a comprehensive database of iconography from the Middle Ages that allows users to browse and search images based on subject, location, medium, and other facets. While the Index’s original emphasis on the Western European canon of early Christian art is evident, its scope now encompasses the entirety of the long Middle Ages, up to the mid-sixteenth century. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/5kp8-0d27

Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus

Launched in 2005, Media-N is an open-access, online journal provides a forum for scholars, artists, and practitioners to share their work and promote critical dialogue on new media art. The initial edition was created from papers of the New Media Caucus at the College Art Association (CAA) conference. See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/yvfb-ve66

Museum Crush

Produced by UK-based charity Culture24, Museum Crush is a “whimsical and witty site . . . which showcases curiosities in collections up [and] down the land.” Serving as a guide to current exhibits and lesser known collections in a wide variety of regional museums and London institutions, the website’s home page succinctly states: “The most beautiful, intriguing and powerful objects . . . live in museums. Let’s go find them.” See full review at https://doi.org/10.17613/3d45-dj23

The Living New Deal

October - 2022October - 2022 Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
Jennifer Tobias
Catalogue Raisonné/ Provenance Researcher
Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
jenny.tobias@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.17613/hq6c-3×22

By initiating “a national database of information, documents, photographs, and personal stories about the public works made possible by the New Deal,” The Living New Deal is building a comprehensive registry of projects completed between 1933 and 1942. Currently, over 17,000 entries represent “hundreds of thousands” of public works, from heroic murals to humble sewers, making it the only reference source of its kind.

Researching New Deal projects can be a challenge. Multiple agencies were involved, and the records are spread among federal repositories (National Park Service, National Archives, Library of Congress, and National Gallery of Art) as well as state and local agencies. Navigating these primary sources can be daunting, while secondary works tend to be either very broad or highly specific. Living New Deal edits this material into concise narratives organized geographically—much like the WPA American Guides series published under the Federal Writers’ Project.

For an average researcher, the Living New Deal website is a good place to get oriented to the era, with a companion iPhone app handy for searching on the move. Users will need to download the app directly from the Apple App Store, since no link is available on the website. Donation-driven, there is no paywall or account to create. The About section outlines the organizational structure and includes contributor biographies as well as annual reports.

The interface is basic: a simple header with seven categories and drop-down subsections supplemented by a keyword site search. For reference purposes –the focus here – the meatiest sections are Map & Sites and the confusingly titled The New Deal, which features substantive entries on programs as well as a timeline, glossary, and footnoted interpretive essays. The index of agencies is especially useful, as is another grouping projects into categories such as Historic Preservation and Labor Law. A timeline and list of landmark acts situate the programs in world events and domestic legislation. The biographies section features concise and sourced entries, with helpful cross-referencing to particular projects. Wikipedia and other sources (National Archives, DPLA, for example) cover many if not all of these topics, but Living New Deal provides welcome focus on material culture.

Map interface showing a beige map of the United States covered in dots representing New Deal Sites. On the left, a light yellow rectangle with search bar and a link back to the homepage is overlaid — *Living New Deal map interface*

Interactive mapping standards are getting higher by the day, but here the Mapbox and OpenStreetMap platforms work well enough, with standard click and zoom features, as well as searching by location (city, state, zipcode). Unfortunately, the standard search box includes unrelated locations and no artist index, making map searches indirect. This means that locating works such as the South Side Community Arts Center involves clicking through a state and city index, then manually paging through alphabetical listings.

A zoomed-in map view of Chicago streets shows South Side Community Arts Center’s location. On the left, a sidebar contains information about the center and a black and white photograph of a crowd of people — *Map view showing the South Side Community Arts Center location with text in sidebar.*

Another workaround: exit the map, do an advanced search, and click through the results to get back to the map. Moreover, the database structure includes categories for artist, contractor, and architect, but not engineer, photographer, or writer. Use of these fields appears to be up to the contributor, so that even if mentioned in the descriptive text, figures such as Hilyard Robinson or Louis Kahn are not indexed and therefore can only be found by keyword searching the whole site.For future iterations, the organizers might look to the integrated design of sites such as Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, and consider releasing Living New Deal as an open-source dataset to make the material portable, interlinkable, and open to wider interpretation. In the meantime, Living New Deal’s 17,000 entries are a unique and valuable compilation.

Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO)

October - 2022October - 2022 Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
Meredith L. Hale, Metadata Librarian
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
mhale16@utk.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/mvw5-m357

Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) is an open access database that aggregates metadata and images of instruments from over 240 museums located on three different continents. The MIMO project, funded by the European Commission, ran from 2009 to 2011, but new museums have joined as recently as 2019. In its initial project phase, the University of Edinburgh was the lead partner with 11 institutions in total participating. The project’s goal was to establish a single access point to digital content and information on musical instruments. As the site’s URL https://mimo-international.com/MIMO/ implies, the resource is “international” in scope and this fact is reinforced through features like multilingual access. Users can access the database and its metadata in 12 languages. Currently, the database shares 64,166 records of musical instruments held in public collections.

Map showing the location of MIMO contributing institutions, with the majority centered in western Europe. — *Map showing MIMO contributing institutions*

This resource has the potential to be beneficial to a wide range of users, from those interested in tracking how instrument families have changed over time to those researching the design and business of instrument making. In terms of temporal coverage, instruments described in the database were produced between 1700 and 2000. Western Europe is most strongly represented in the database, but works from Asia, Africa, South America, and North America are also present. To navigate through these resources, users can complete a keyword search, use facets, or browse lists found on three tabs on the site’s header. The tabs include “Instrument Families,” “Museums,” and “Instrument Makers.” The “Instrument Makers” tab will be particularly helpful to those researching the design and business of instrument making. Users can browse controlled terms for makers by the categories of “Persons,” “Corporations,” and “Families.”

Instrument Makers tab showing the names of persons, corporations and families that begin with the letter "C" associated with producing musical instruments. Dates showing the lifespan or most active period for a maker are also present. — *Instrument Makers tab showing the names of persons, corporations and families associated with producing musical instruments.*

Content found on individual records differs based on the object and standards of the contributing museum, but each record includes fields for a title, maker, creation date, creation location, instrument family, description, inscriptions, and measurements. Note that while multilingual access is highlighted, only select fields in the metadata are translated based on the language selected by the users. Those wanting to identify literature associated with particular pieces will also be pleased to see that some works include a reference tab that acts as a bibliography of the instrument. Approximately 2,000 records also include access to audio and videos that document the way a person interacts with the selected instrument and its musical range. Closer examination of this content reveals that unfortunately many of these records share broken media links. Several links out to full metadata from the providing partner are also broken (e.g. Elektronisch Instrument). While link rot over time is expected, additional quality control is needed to find and address issues like these.

Record for “Synthétiseur Synthi A” that includes video content showing how an instrument is played and documenting the music the instrument makes. — Record for “Synthétiseur Synthi A” showing video content. Note that while English is selected as the language, most metadata for this record appears in French (only labels and instrument family are translated).

In addition to users whose primary goal is to search the database’s musical content, staff in libraries, archives, and museums will also find the extensive documentation on digitization, metadata sharing, and project management invaluable. The MIMO Digitization Standard provides guidance on how to best represent musical instruments digitally, by defining mandatory and optional views for all instrument families. It also established guidelines for contributors for mapping and sharing records using the LIDO schema and OAI-PMH. The longevity and reach of MIMO are noteworthy. The project began soon after Europeana was established in 2008 and predates the launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in 2013. MIMO has shared content with Europeana from its beginning, which likely contributed to its thorough documentation of procedures and standards. Like DPLA, MIMO has a membership model to ensure its sustainability. There are three membership levels that require tiered payments from partners based on desired services. Current agreements with data providers are valid through the end of 2023 and will likely be renewed, so MIMO intends to endure and grow. While online resources have changed greatly since MIMO was established thirteen years ago, the database continues to act as a valuable open access resource that serves the unique need of providing a single access point to digital content on musical instruments.

Example from the MIMO Digitization Standard indicating the required views for upright keyboard instruments. Three images of an upright piano are included. For upright keyboard instruments, a vertical position with a frontal view is recommended and it is required that the keyboard flap is open.

Transcription: Upright keyboard instruments: Vertical position and frontal view. The keyboard is facing the camera in a horizontal line. The view with open keyboard flap is mandatory. The view with closed keyboard flap and - for organs closed doors, if existent - is recommended. For stringed instruments, a view with removed front panels to show the construction is recommended. — Example from the MIMO Digitization Standard indicating the required views for upright keyboard instruments. A vertical position with a frontal view is recommended and it is required that the keyboard flap is open.

Materia: Journal of Technical Art History

June - 2022June - 2022 Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
Julia L. Bourbois
Pomona Public Library
julia.bourbois@pomonaca.gov
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/vf8y-f039

Launched in the spring of 2021, Materia: Journal of Technical Art History is a biannual, born-digital, open-access, peer-reviewed journal for the technical study of art objects.. Materia is situated at the convergence of conservation science, art history, and related fields, and is co-edited by an international group of conservators and art historians. The journal aims to cater to a broad and international audience, including conservation specialists, museum professionals, art historians, students, and researchers engaged in the interdisciplinary field of material culture. Additionally, the resource is intended to act as a scholarly forum that bridges diverse fields often siloed by paywall barriers. Readers can access issues of Materia directly from their website (materiajournal.com) or by signing up to the mailing list to receive the latest information on calls for abstracts, issues releases, and news.

Materia foregrounds access both in terms of content and authorship. For example, conservation articles examine the treatment and analysis of material culture objects without being overladen with technical jargon. Additionally, Materia operates within a broad notion of conservation, soliciting articles on objects in addition to traditional easel paintings. Art history articles offer fresh perspectives of both historically marginalized artists and well-known figures. The articles currently available is Issue 2 reflect this diversity with articles including “Technical Analysis and Treatment of a Siberian Reindeer-Fur Overcoat,” “Manet Across Media: Looking at Lola de Valence” and “The Problem with Bitumen.” Materia also provides a platform for publishing scholarly research undertaken by students and early-career professionals in conservation and technical art history.

Materia’s approach to article access and journal production models is also innovative. The journal differs in comparison to similar journals such as the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, a membership or institution subscription-based publication, and the Technical Bulletin published by the National Gallery, a leading resource in the study of the materials and techniques of painting conservation since 1977. Instead, as an open access digital resource, the editors of Materia are dedicated to free readership and no submission fees to increase access to research material for both readers and writers. As such, the editors of Materia effectively sidestep the myriad difficulties that currently plague print scholarly journals including costs of print publication, working with publishers, and the bundling of online journals.

Materia is well-produced and executed effectively. The website is clearly arranged and on the whole, easily navigable. However, it should be noted that once in the web version of an issue, there is no home button to return to the landing page of the site. Issues are available as a navigable web version with zoomable images and linked citations. The interactive images available in the web version are beneficial and enable the reader to examine the images in greater detail than possible in other formats. Full issues and individual articles are also available as PDFs, and no additional software is required to access the content of this resource.

Child’s Siberian fur coat — Images showing the front and back of a heavily-worn child’s Siberian fur coat with colorful bead work at the wrists and waist, pre-treatment.

Child’s Siberian fur coat (detail) — Detailed image of the sleeve of a child’s Siberian fur coat with colorful beadwork.

Materia is a valuable resource for anyone interested in technical art history, particularly those engaged in the technical investigation and analysis of works of art, as well as art historians, curators, and graduate students in these and related fields. However, it is worth exploring by anyone interested in material culture.

Nautilus Catalogue

June - 2022June - 2022 Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
lauren c. molina, Digital Assets and Records Manager
Autry Museum of the American West
lauren.c.molina@gmail.com
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/g7p5-bc33

The aim of Nautilus Catalogue is to provide a database of Nautilus pompilius shells-turned-art object by aggregating information from a variety of disparate collections – and it does exactly this. Created by independent art historian Marsley Kehoe, Nautilus Catalogue consists of a web-based database and downloadable dataset that expands on on Hanns-Ulrich Mette’s 1995 catalogue of nautilus shells.

About Shells and Mounts page image — Text from the ‘About Shells and Mounts’ page of Nautilus Catalogue which lists common terminology terms in bolded text and following each term, defines the common term as used within the website

Kehoe explains the Nautilus Catalogue in detail on three of the resource’s five web pages. Most helpful of all are the “Common terminology” (NautilusCatalogue_3.png) section of the “About Nautilus Shells and Mounts” page and the “How to use this Catalogue” page in its entirety. Reading the text at both of the aforementioned pages makes the experience of using this resource more meaningful (although it is not at all required).

Search results page image — Three records and thumbnail images displayed on Nautilus Catalogue which were returned when searching for ‘coral, figure’ in the search bar under the main menu at the left of the page.

Built with WordPress and Omeka by importing CSV data, the Nautilus Catalogue successfully achieves what Kehoe has set out to do. This free resource displays true to itself across devices and browsers. It is unfettered by any special media viewers that might otherwise make it difficult to translate from desktop to handheld device, giving the user freedom of continued access from any place. There is an easy and effective search bar below the menu panel of this site, which allows the visitor to explore the items of this digital collection using one or many terms (NautilusCatalogue_1.png). The home page does not immediately present image(s) before the user begins their journey by navigating to the “Browse Items” page or by dreaming up a search term to find an item. This site is heavy with text to assert its purpose; text that reads easily, yet at its length may feel somewhat overwhelming to a visitor favoring the image. However lengthy the text is, it informs the user what can be found within Nautilus Catalogue, how to find it, and why it is presented. While this reviewer wonders if a more image-dominant web design might benefit the resource (perhaps with images inserted within the body of the text on the home page), the textual data found within provides detailed information pertaining to each nautilus object, which may be more relevant to audiences aligned with Kehoe’s own scholarship as an art historian. Most entertaining of Kehoe’s decisions with this resource is the choice to include a word cloud within the “Browse by Tag” section on the “Browse Items” page where terms are shown at scale. The word cloud (NautilusCatalogue_2.png) visualizes the catalogue when individual records may still lack images of the objects themselves to view. The word cloud also reveals that stripping shells, whether selectively or wholly, is a common practice in the creation of these objects.

Browse by tag word cloud — Text which has been assembled into a word cloud that can be seen by clicking on the ‘Browse by Tag’ tab on the ‘Browse Items’ page of *Nautilus Catalogue*

A variety of audiences may benefit from this resource: curators, collectors, history scholars, and shell and oddities enthusiasts. Nautilus Catalogue is Kehoe’s attempt to “make sense” of this broadly collected and somewhat obscure type of object. It is an interesting starting place to begin to consider some of the motives behind the European fascination with exoticism and ornament, or museological histories, or specialized crafts, or a number of other reasons why this specific kind of object was made, prized, utilized, and/or presented. Despite (and perhaps because) Nautilus Catalogue is a very pared down, straight-forward resource, it has the promise of being a site where historical, conservational, art, and cultural research might converge upon these curious items.

Internet Culturale

June - 2022June - 2022 Alexandra Provo

Reviewed by:
Spyros Koulouris, Cataloging Librarian
Gennadius Library – American School of Classical Studies at Athens
skoulouris.genn@ascsa.edu.gr
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/s5sz-qr26

Internet Culturale is a multiyear project that aims to bring together in one platform the digital assets created by Italian repositories. This national network of partners provides access to thousands of materials made available by libraries, archives, and museums. The platform is managed by ICCU – the Italian Central Institute for the Union Catalog, which is part of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Currently 175 repositories across the country share their materials through the aggregator. Collections within the platform are organized by subject and/or medium. These include resources documenting visual arts, music, history, architecture, literature, and the sciences from the 8th to the 20th century in a variety of formats such as books, maps, images, manuscripts, drawings, music scores, and audio visual materials. Collections are displayed as online exhibitions that comprise objects from one or more libraries. A brief introductory text gives some summary information about the content of each exhibit, while users can either browse the collections, search for specific terms, or use the facets. Full-text searching is available for some of the resources.

Italy is notorious for its rich art historical collections that are spread all over the country. One of Internet Culturale’s strengths is that it makes visible the resources owned by small libraries, no matter if they are located in big cities or remote towns. Of additional value is that the records of some other Italian shared catalogs have been exported and are part of the platform. For example, records from SBN (the network of the National Library Services), Manus online (a database of manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages to the 19th century), and EDIT16 (the census of the 16th century Italian editions) are searchable through Internet Culturale. In some cases links to external catalogs are used for digital content that is not hosted in the platform. Among the many interesting collections currently available that users can find are the Autografi Palatini collection of the National Library in Florence (which includes 1200 autographs from significant personalities such as Orazio Rucellai, Benvenuto Cellini, Angelo Poliziano, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Michelangelo), the maps collection of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, and the Judaica of the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma (with more than 180 incunabula and 16th century books). Another key aspect of the catalog is that digital content is provided under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. The metadata created by the repositories have a CC0 1.0 universal public domain dedication, making it easy to distribute and reuse information without asking for permission. One potential concern is that the last import was made in 2020. Hopefully, the platform will continue to be updated in the future.

Book viewer in Internet Culturale — Screenshot of the *Internet Culturale* book viewer showing the book *Liber quartus Vribium praecipuarum totius mundi*

Currently, the site is only available in Italian, and therefore users will need to be able to read Italian to use the resource. With some targeted metadata improvements, Internet Culturale has great potential for expanding accessibility to an international audience. This can be done by increasing the use of multi-lingual controlled vocabularies and thesauri. Organizing the metadata in a more structured way would help surmount language-related barriers, supporting access for everyone.

Overall, Internet Culturale has the potential to become the main hub to document and access hidden collections of Italian art and culture. In the post Covid-19 era, small repositories that do not have the staff and resources to manage their digital assets can benefit from it, curate their online collections, and offer them to the broader community. The platform can become a model for national-level catalogs to be used by students, librarians, and researchers in a variety of disciplines: historians, musicologists, art historians, archaeologists, botanists as well as artists in different fields like music, acting, and visual arts.

Art Institute of Chicago Online Collection

April - 2022May - 2022 Gabriella Karl-Johnson

Reviewed by:
Peter Klubek, Reference and Research Services Librarian
Edith Garland Dupré Library, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
peter.klubek@louisiana.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/606t-tp86

The Art Institute of Chicago online collection is a freely accessible web-based platform that provides access to the most complete virtual version of the resources and collections of the museum. The site is full of detailed visual, textual, and multimedia material for more than one-hundred and sixteen thousand objects, showcasing the best possible representation of the museum’s holdings less a visit to the museum in person. This resource offers many opportunities to explore various aspects of individual artworks and the museum at large, including research guides, teaching resources, bibliographies, links to the museum’s library and archives, and other tools for exploration and learning.

The landing page features images of some of the most famous items in the Art Institute’s collection, tiled below a search box and a row of small clickable thumbnails to browse the items by genre, era, subject, object type, or medium. The larger images of artworks are displayed four images across with roughly 50 artworks per page, with lesser-known works shown on numerous following pages. When a user clicks on a thumbnail of an individual artwork, they are taken to a page displaying a brief written piece that covers the artist, history, and content of that particular work, with links to museum audio tours, more detailed information on artists and artworks, and personal reflections by museum staff and others. The writing throughout is clear and accessible, and could be used as a starting point by researchers at any level. Item-level metadata is more extensive than comparable museum collection websites, and a wide set of criteria on the left column allows users to filter and sort items. Users can toggle to display only items currently on view in the museum or in the public domain, among other selections. Some metadata is searchable but not displayed; for example, a search for “rabbits” reveals some items that depict rabbits even though the word “rabbits” does not appear in the public display of the corresponding item record.

An example of brief text in an artwork item record.

Users that could benefit the most from this resource include historians and arts educators, as well as artists and art students needing high-resolution images to explore technical aspects of an individual work. Scholars of art history will find useful the downloadable high-resolution images, exhibition histories, provenance details, and lists of publications related to each artwork. Developers can make use of the museum’s public API. Arts educators will appreciate the option to check the box in the filter menu that reads “Has educational resources available,” which displays over one hundred items with attached Educator Resource Packets to help with classroom instruction. Multimedia resources linked from artwork item records include videos and audio tours, along with links to past exhibition websites that include a wide range of materials.

Accessibly options could be improved, as it is difficult to locate the alt text of an image and keyboard control options appear limited. Despite these factors, the website is easy to navigate, with a logical delivery method and good performance on all tested browsers. The mobile version of the site is seamlessly adapted from the desktop version, offering the ability to enhance a museum visitor’s experience in the physical space of the museum, while also thoroughly serving users who are accessing the collection as a virtual-only experience. In the COVID-19 era, virtual options for using and viewing the museum collection are invaluable, and the AIC online collection is well-designed to meet the challenges brought by the pandemic.

On the whole, the structure of the online collection is coherent, well-organized, and suitable for both non-expert and expert users. The Art Institute of Chicago online collection provides an enjoyable and comprehensive virtual experience that exceeds the virtual platforms of comparable museums. The St. Louis Art Museum virtual collection offers many of the same features, including downloadable high-resolution images, but it does not share the additional in-depth written material included in the Art Institute of Chicago online collection, nor the extent of cataloged objects (about 6,000 objects). The Museum of Fine Arts Boston virtual collection is also similar, but is chunkier in its execution and usability. Overall the Art Institute of Chicago online collection is an excellent tool that could be useful in any art or research library.