ARLIS/NA 49th Annual Conference

This presentation will report on the initial findings of a case study that applied crowdsourcing as a methodology for enhanced description of archival photographs through community engagement. It will explore how the collective memory within communities can be harnessed to generate descriptive metadata for image-based collections, thereby enhancing their discovery. The majority of crowdsourcing initiatives developed by libraries and archives are transcription-based projects. In contrast, this project adopted crowdsourcing for the description of image-based resources. By engaging community members to describe archival photographs that relate to their histories, the descriptive information takes on new, deeper dimensions of meaning. In this way, community-driven description can support diversity, equity and inclusion by involving communities in the construction of their own historical narratives. This presentation will review the outcomes of this methodology, describe future applications, and discuss the broader opportunities this methodology offers for community outreach and engagement.

Moderator: Colleen Farry


Inter-Agency Collaboration: Piloting a Visual Resources Consortium to Meet Society of Architectural Historians Preservation Goals through an NEH Grant-Funded Project

This presentation provides an overview of our successful NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Planning Grant award and its related work advancing the Society of Architectural Historians’ Color Film Emergency Project. The grant, which was announced just as the world went into pandemic lockdown, has presented a clash of good news/bad news challenges. The presenters will discuss the grant project origins and how the project is taking shape, as well as obstacles encountered and lessons learned, including their navigation of the University of California’s federal grant policies and processing, and the complications resulting from a sub-award model. They will also discuss piloting the consortium model being developed through the grant project, and the incorporation of recent learning through polling efforts. The presenters hope to gain both feedback and participation interest from ARLIS/NA members.

Speakers: Sonja Sekely-Rowland and Jacqueline Spafford

Building Bridges: Working Together to Disseminate Japanese Art Literature

This joint presentation will address the current collaboration between the Getty Research Institute and the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties to disseminate a selection of recently-digitized texts on Japanese art. Through metadata coordination between our institutions, this literature, which includes Japanese art journals, rare exhibition catalogs on Japanese art, and woodblock print books, has been made available via the Getty Research Portal, a free online search platform that provides access to digitized art history texts contributed by a range of international institutions. With a significant number of these texts not previously available online and functionally inaccessible for many scholars—made all the more so given travel restrictions with the current pandemic—our institutions aimed to make this valuable material readily obtainable in digital form. This presentation will address the collaboration’s history and challenges, explore some of the digitized content, and discuss future potential outcomes.

Speakers: Annie Rana and Tomoko Emura

Capturing the Knowledge of the Crowd: Crowdsourcing Initiatives with Archival Photographic Collections

This presentation will report on the initial findings of a case study that applied crowdsourcing as a methodology for enhanced description of archival photographs through community engagement. It will explore how the collective memory within communities can be harnessed to generate descriptive metadata for image-based collections, thereby enhancing their discovery. The majority of crowdsourcing initiatives developed by libraries and archives are transcription-based projects. In contrast, this project adopted crowdsourcing for the description of image-based resources. By engaging community members to describe archival photographs that relate to their histories, the descriptive information takes on new, deeper dimensions of meaning. In this way, community-driven description can support diversity, equity and inclusion by involving communities in the construction of their own historical narratives. This presentation will review the outcomes of this methodology, describe future applications, and discuss the broader opportunities this methodology offers for community outreach and engagement.

Speaker: Colleen Farry