Words about Images

Begging your pardon for the lapse in posting--can it really be as long as last November when I was moved by the muse to contribute to this blog? Maybe it really has taken that long to mull over thoughts until they have become malleable into sentences.

Words, sentences, paragraph: idea, concept, representation. How's that for a GRE question? I have been reading about cataloging and searching of images in several different venues. Much like the warp speed of book catalogs going from print to online beasts, online access to images, or the knowledge of where an image resides in a printed format, has gone from a moseying pedestrian to high-speed rail. (Although here in California the concept of high speed rail continues to be a mythical creature.)

I am frequently asked, in my lucky position as an O-fficial Art Librarian, my thoughts about services that provide access to online images. Let me go ahead and throw my hat on the dinner table and say that ARTSTOR is indeed the current ne plus ultra of online image libraries. It is. Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it takes time to learn how to use. But with a million images and counting, it is outpacing the collections of would-be competitors.

But the purpose of this post is to draw attention to current Anglo-American methodologies of how images are cataloged, how are images represented in databases that rely on text. I refer you to, and defer to, the expertise of librarians at The Getty and the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA). One may see the CDWA online at: http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/cdwa/

If you would like a good introduction to what the CDWA is for, and how librarians feel confident (it is one of our charming attributes, our confidence) in assigning subject/content labels to works of art, I refer you to Patricia Harpring's excellent chapter The Language of Images: Enhancing Access to Images by Applying Metadata Schemas and Structured Vocabularies which appears in Introduction to Art Image Access: Issues, Tools, Standards, and Strategies, 2002, Edited by Murtha Baca. You need just lift a finger, and gently click:

http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/intro_aia/harpring.html

Go! Read! I have to go to the desk.