Art Institute Chicago: Online Sleuthing

Posted on 24 April 2010 | Comments Off

A project as exciting as it is daunting, a new kind of web-based collections catalog is now currently being developed by the museum. It will deliver the broad array of scholarly, art historical information usually associated with a weighty bound volume in an easily used digital format.

Over the next four years, curators Gloria Groom and Douglas Druick will be collaborating with their colleagues in the museum’s paintings conservation laboratory to research and write lavishly illustrated and indexed catalogue entries about the museum’s Monet and Renoir paintings. Accompanying the essay on each painting will be primary archival information on collectors; histories of ownership provenance; publication and exhibition histories; analytical reports including x-rays, infrared, and ultraviolet photography; and the results of many other kinds of sleuthing.

All of this will allow online readers the chance to understand the pictures through the curators’ and conservators’ eyes—as well as have the unprecedented opportunity to explore the primary evidence in an interactive environment and develop their own conclusions.

—Sam Q., VP for Collections Management, Imaging & Information Technology/Museum CIO

via ARTicle.

Comments