Hi all: I am excited to announce some forthcoming updates for the cittern site; however, one of them has me in a real quandary for which I seek your collective wisdom.
I am in the process of making a major update to the artwork gallery. To-date, there are approximately 110 citations for paintings, drawings, engravings, woodcuts, sculptures, and other types of carvings. Of these, I have images for approximately 60%-70%. In its current form, the art gallery (which is now separate from the woodcuts gallery) simply contains a listing of each art work sorted by approximate date and, when available, a thumbnail image that is linked to a larger image. In the process of assembling the current works, I have continued with this format. Suffice to say, even with only thumbnail images present, the page will require the loading of over about 70 images -- far too many in my opinion. As well, there is no easy way to navigate the page since it is simply one long list. I am now faced with the dilemma of how best to divide the works into separate, more manageable galleries/pages. I have made a few experiments, but I am not entirely pleased with any one result. Therefore, I ask the wisdom of those most likely to use such a resource: What is the best way to sort this many works for researching purposes? Here are a few ideas I have had for setting up the "galleries" : -Galleries by type of medium: paintings, woodcuts, sculptures, carvings, drawings. Pro: It's nice to compare similar types of works. Con: Too many paintings would necessitate breaking the paintings down into multiple pages (how to do this?). -Galleries by approx. date of work. Pro: One might be able to better trace the development of the instrument by date. Con: Not all images are dateable. Many (most) seem to be from the 17th C. (probably not enough differentiation to sort adequately into separate pages?). -Galleries by country of work's origin. Pro: One might be able to see a country-trend for instruments depicted? Con: Artists travel, some works are of uncertain origin... and most of the works seem to be Dutch(!). -Galleries by alphabetical order of artist. Pro: This is perhaps the easiest solution (simple!). Con: Possibly not very useful as a research tool? Again, my goal here is three-fold: Make pages/download times more manageable, make page navigation more manageable, and create a research-friendly format. Any and all thoughts would be greatly appreciated. If all else fails, I suppose I could just eliminate thumbnails altogether and simply keep this as a massive, date-sorted list with links to larger images... -Andrew http://www.theaterofmusic.com/cittern/ PS I plan to keep the old and new instrument galleries as-is for the time being... To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
