On Feb 28, 2009, at 9:20 AM, Chris Miller wrote:
Just received the 400K image of a Parthenon marble for which I
applied yesterday from the British Museum.
Wow ! -- that's huge -- 10X larger than museums typically offer --
and it only took them 24 hours to email it to me.
400Kb is not "huge." It's middlin'. 4Mb is larger by a factor of 10,
but even that can barely do justice to the original. Unless 400Kb is
all the quality you are looking for.
The good news is that they've got a catalog of one-million-plus
items --- the bad news is that less than 10% are presented with
pictures -- but the good news is that they're not just doing the hi-
lites -- they seem to be methodically going through the collection.
Why else would they now include over 20,000 images of objects from
20th C. Japan ? (including bolts of cloth, handbags, etc etc)
The British Museum says on its own website that its collection
comprises "seven million objects." It also says that there are
1,020,390 items in its database, and of them, 283,124 entries include
one or more images. That's 28% with pictures.
So it appears that the major European museums (Louvre, Prado, and
British) have a different attitude towards the proliferation of
images than museums in America.
Perhaps that's because their ownership is public rather than private
-- except that the website of America's National Gallery is no
better than any of the others.
NGA: 106,000 in the collection and the NGA searchable database.
MoMA: Online collection consists of approximately 24,436 objects,
representing almost 4,937 individual artists, out of a total
collection of 150,000 paintings and 22,000 media works.
LACMA: They're displaying a paltry 3,700 works from their permanent
collection. They have 70,000 works online. Their entire collection
consists of over 100,000 pieces, meaning that they've put 70% online.
SFMOMA: Total collection numbers more than 26,000 works, of which
"more than 3,500" are online. That's 13.4%.
AIC: More than 300,000 items, of which "over 33,000" are online.
Cleveland MoA: More than 43,000 works in the collection; their online
database has a record of every item, and of that total, "just over
half" include images in the database.
High MoA: More than 11,000 pieces. It doesn't say how many are online
nor does it have an explicit "browse the collection" link.
Dallas MoA: 23,00 in collection; 4,900 online, i.e., 21%, more than
twice the rate of the British Museum.
Etc.
For whatever reason, American museum management just does not think
that seeing their entire collection is important.
Every one of these museums makes its collection available for study.
They are more in the business of running a high-end amusement park.
Oh, how tiresome.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
