On teaching with digital images.
Specifically with regard to the features of the
Academic Image Cooperative Prototype.
3/1/2000

Date Wed, 1 Mar 2000 123008 -0500
From "Robert A. Baron"
Subject Re Digital vs Slides in the classroom
To: CAAH@pucc.Princeton.EDU

---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender:       CONSORTIUM OF ART AND ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS
              <CAAH@PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU>
Poster:       "Robert A. Baron" <>
Subject:      Re: Digital vs Slides in the classroom
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At 10:36 PM 2/29/00 -0500, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin wrote:
>...  Robert Baron also has an offering.  Both are members of the
>list; perhaps they will say a few words about the concepts of their
>proposals, and not just the addresses of their websites.  We will get
>nowhere unless we have some intellectual content in the material we are
>trying to amass.

After the second session of the Copyright Town Meeting at the CAA
convention ended, a teacher approached me with a problem that clearly
frustrated her. I think she was close to tears. Her department has stopped
the production of all slides for teaching and has no budget for
acquisitions. In a word, she can't obtain visual materials for her courses
and can't teach. The reason -- not uncommon these days -- is that someone
in the administration decided that copying images out of books is an
infringement and is not a fair use. No argument to the contrary is
acceptable in this institution. Discussion has ended.

The common alternatives, acquisition of licensed materials, site-licensing,
individual requests for permission to copy, for a variety of reasons to
some degree are all unacceptable. Of course, to some degree, for the
discipline as a whole, each image resource is both unacceptable and yet
potentially vital, so I wish to emphasize that no image resource is
unappreciated; they all should receive encouragement in proportion to their
utility.

The Academic Image Cooperative, for which I work -- a program supported by
the College Art Association and the Digital Library Federation -- aims to
offer a partial solution to this dilemma and, in service to the teaching of
art history, to take advantage of this opportunity to offer something quite
new in the area of visual resources. The primary purpose of the AIC is to
provide images when none are available. This mission includes serving those
schools that heretofore have not been able to teach art history for lack of
a slide collection. (This will increase the demand for art historian
teachers, it is reasoned.)

The principle premise of the AIC is to collect photographs of public domain
works of art that have been submitted to us by photographers (typically
academics) for distribution as digital images to scholars, teachers,
artists and students for non-profit, educational purposes. We also envision
copying images from published works and image archives when their contents
are in the public domain.

Because the AIC is intended to be a teaching tool, collection development
is expected to respond first to the needs of undergraduate curricula --
first filling the image set required to teach the survey and then, as the
AIC expands, by design filling more specialized needs, and
opportunistically by accepting materials tangential to teaching and
suitable for research.

In its most rudimentary form, the AIC appears to be just a surrogate for a
visual resources collection -- a way to locate the images needed to teach.
Indeed, that is how it will be used by many.  But it also offers art
historians and visual resources curators somethings  rather new:

==> A concordance that indexes works and links them to the survey textbooks
in which they are used. We have already indexed the ten most frequently
used survey texts and have prepared a master list of the 2500 key works
that are used in more than a single book. Each work is indexed to the
figure number of the book that cites it. One benefit of this device is that
you can get a list of survey books that discusses any individual work --
allowing comparison of contents and offering new opportunities for freshman
projects. For instance, you can ask students to compare how a work is
treated in a variety of texts.

But the most important benefit of our indexing are the hierarchical links
to the table of contents. Our query structure permits all images of works
cited in any level of the table of contents to be called at once -- without
having to issue detailed queries for one work at a time. (List all the
works or give me all available images that Janson uses in his Romanesque
chapter or just in the section on Romanesque, Burgundian Sculpture, etc.)

==> Mrs. Lavin mentioned that Princeton now has a facility for creating
side-by-side comparisons of digital images. AIC offers this too, as does a
number of digital resources, such as Luna Imaging. In our demonstration
system we pull these images directly from our Internet servers, in the
future, integration with departmental collections should be possible.

==> But the most interesting scholarly feature of the AIC -- for art
historians anyway -- might be the catalogue itself. Our catalogue offers
the ability to catalogue works and to record and preserve the richness of
their history and of their creation.

Most visual resources collection documentation serves merely as a finding
tool to locate teaching images. Short cuts are taken with the data in many
of these. The AIC data model offers the ability to record information
typically ignored. We can document the entire history of attribution of any
work. Any number of individuals or corporate bodies can be linked to a work
in any number of roles. Each such link can be documented by a citation that
leads to bibliographic or other sources. Ideally we could ask for all the
recorded attributions by a given individual. Dates, too, can be documented
in this way. Patrons, owners, collectors, dealers, technicians, makers,
scholars, etc. can all be linked to specific works. Works can be documented
by provenance and followed as they pass from collection to collection.
Works can be linked to each other, and the nature of these links can be
specified. Thus sources and works that serve as documentation for other
works can be identified. Also, works can be linked hierarchically so that
you can build part/whole structures that associate things like multi-part
altarpieces, fresco cycles, narratives or cathedrals, for example. I can go
on and describe other functions built into the AIC data model, but I just
want you to get an idea of the kind of information we can document in this
resource that differs from earlier object and image databases.

While providing images is its main goal, the AIC is not necessarily image
driven. We can record works for which we have no images and we can use
those records to publish lists of images we need.

Even with the above, we are still at the beginning. No plans have been made
to collect related literary documentation or for analyzing subject matter
well. Having all this (and all of the above, for that matter) will depend
upon how our community expresses its need for the AIC service and on our
ability to fund its development.

As mentioned to individuals who visited our booth at the CAA convention or
who came to our demonstration, we are now entering a phase of assessment.
From what we developed or planned to develop, we need to know what people
really want to have. Are the scholarly cataloging features important?
Should the AIC just offer images and dispense with scholarly cataloging?
How do we raise money to pay for this?  These days, to become a viable
service the project must become self supporting. Are its benefits
envisioned of sufficient worth to receive broad support from departments,
individuals? What should be our obligations to the public outside of the
discipline? Written testimonials of support from the discipline will be
important.

We represent the AIC as a "community" project -- generally meaning that the
community of academics donate images for the common good of the community;
but, the AIC is a community project in a wider sense, too, since as a
community of scholars we must decide what kind of service is needed, what
we will support. If there is little or no call to maintain an object
catalogue such as I described above, it is unlikely to be continued or
further developed. Maintaining such a resource takes time, of course, but
it also takes subject expertise.  Specialists and experts must be willing
to serve as consultants to identify resources and edit information.

[To see a Powerpoint demonstration of the Prototype, consult
http://www.studiolo.org\AIC\AICprototype.htm]


Robert Baron

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