Digital Collection Road Trip: Activating Museum Collections by Digitizing Rare and Unique Materials from the Library and Archives

In 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Library received a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to digitize an important and unique collection of 18th and 19th century European art auction catalogs in the renowned John G. Johnson Collection. More than 1200 masterpieces in the Johnson Collection form the core of the Museum’s European painting holdings. Mr. Johnson’s collection of auction catalogs, which was also donated to the Museum, is of vital importance to our understanding of the history of collecting and connoisseurship in the United States. In many instances, Mr. Johnson’s copies of auction catalogs are the only versions annotated with the prices realized in actual sales and/or information pertaining to the buyers. In addition, one out of every five of Mr. Johnson’s catalogs represents an edition that has never been filmed or digitized. Digitizing these catalogs will make this unique corpus of materials, a total of more than 1,500 titles, widely available to museum curators, art historians and researchers throughout the world as well as the general public via multiple channels, including the Internet Archive, PMA Library’s online catalog, OCLC’s SCIPIO auction catalogue database, and the new Getty Research Portal.

After a brief overview of the collection and the project workflow, the presenters will give a quick walk-through of their cataloging and digitization processes. The webinar will also cover some of the steps and procedures of working with Lyrasis, Internet Archive, Getty Research Institute, and the Library’s system vendor to extract and manipulate the metadata associated with the digitized catalogs. At the end, the presenters will share some interesting aspects of the project and lessons learned.

Date: October 24, 2013

Time: 1:00-2:00 ET

 

Host: Regan Harper

Presenters: Billy Chi-hing Kwan, Assistant Library Director

Ryan McNally, Project Cataloger and Coordinator
Philadelphia Museum of Art Library

For more information and to register, click here.