The Academic Image Cooperative: PowerPoint Tour

The Academic Image Cooperative
Prototype Database
A guided tour of the image database
exhibited at the New York meeting of the
College Art Association, NY, February 2000.

Adapted from the introduction to the guided tour:

The art history database program demonstrated in the PowerPoint Guided Tour was commissioned in support of the proposition that the art historical teaching community needed a source of visual documentation that was not encumbered by copyright or ownership restrictions, one where teachers, students and scholars could "trade" and submit their private photographs of works of art for their mutual benefit. At the same time, it was believed that the database used to do this should be capable of sustaining a robust cataloging environment equal to the complexity of real-world scholarly art information and of providing tools useful for research, teaching and class presentations.

These goals were achieved in part by the creation of what the AIC called the "Textbook Concordance," an indexing system that links the occurrence of images in standard textbooks with the image and data holdings of this database. By searching for works by the pedagogical categories devised by textbook authors (i.e. Medieval/ Romanesque/ Burgundian/ Sculpture), teachers and students could find images suitable for their studies with greater efficiency and efficacy than heretofore imaginable.

The cataloging environment developed for the "Prototype" acknowledges the fact that for many works key elements, such as identification, attribution and dating, are in continual flux and that identifying works by a single immutable set of catalogued "facts" will ultimately serve to decrease the utility of the database and turn its information into something old and stale. Capturing the variety, vitality and history of this data (when it exists) by design, by seizing an opportunity, by serendipitous exploration, or by taking advantage of the wealth of expertise available through its community of users are means by which the AIC expected to remain vital and grow. Equal in importance is the program’s ability to document the source and authority of attribution data.

The database environment demonstrated in the tour supports these ideals through the standard means of utilizing data models and structures developed by authorities such as the Art History Information Program of the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Visual Resources Association. But it also achieves these ends by having created a unique set of searching tools that allows users to investigate how one set of data is associated with another set. These functions are at the heart of the following set of demonstrations. The "Prototype" incorporates some of these features, but at this time is not complete.

At the time of this writing, the "Prototype" application demonstrated is no longer being supported or developed by the AIC, a program of the Digital Library Federation. It is presented here with the expectation that, once understood, the wisdom of developing this kind of scholarly cataloging environment will be self-evident and that an enterprising institution or sympathetic benefactor may come forward to continue this project where the AIC left off.

For additional information consult: http://www.pipeline.com/~rabaron/index07.htm.

Table of Contents of Guided Tour:
I.	Help screens	>	Contains instructions on the use and features of the application.
II.	About the AIC (draft)	>	Sample texts describing the program. (No longer valid.)
III.	Showing a Slide-Show	>	Features monitor and projection capabilities of a slide-show created for a class-room presentation. Most people will start the guided tour here. Demonstrates interactive data structures.
IV.	Browsing and Textbook Concordance	>	Browsing permits access to all terms in a field. Find information and images as used in a standard textbook.
V.	Advanced Search	>	Search a designated field for content.
VI.	Simple Search	>	Search a designated set of fields for content.
VII.	Customizing	>	Adapt application output to individual needs.
VIII.	The "Want List"	>	How to list works missing images.
IX.	Credits	>	Short list of contributors to the application.

Download the PowerPoint Guided Tour:

The AIC Prototype Guided Tour Download consists of two files, an installer (pngsetup.exe) and a PowerPoint packed file (pres0.ppz). Some browsers will have a plug-in installed that permits the ppz file to run and be displayed without being installed. Otherwise, this download will require the recipient to own a copy of PowerPoint or the license-free PowerPoint viewer available from Microsoft. Those who expect to use PowerPoint or a viewer after downloading, are requested to run pngsetup.exe from the same directory in which resides pres0.ppz. You will be prompted for a DOS compatible directory name for the resulting file. A large, high-resolution monitor is highly recommended. Any viewer capable of resolutions higher than 800x600 should be minimally adequate, but because the images contain text, the higher the resolution and the larger the monitor screen, the better.

Note that the PowerPoint file is very large. Interested individuals who cannot conveniently download the large PowerPoint file may send a 100 megabyte zip disk and have it returned by mail. MAC users will know whether or not they can used the WIN Powerpoint file. Write for further instructions.