Case Study: History of Art, University College Cork

Summary

This short case study looks at how the newly established History of Art department at University College Cork went about building a collection of images to support its teaching. Although it would have preferred to create an all-digital collection, the constraints of time, money and copyright led the department to take a hybrid approach, using a mix of formats, drawn from several different sources.

Prepared by JISC Digital Media with assistance from .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), University College Cork

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Finding and Making Images
4. Coordinating the Image Collection
5. Delivering the Images
6. Future Plans
7. Conclusion

1. Introduction

 This study highlights the role of the Visual Resources Officer in coordinating the resources, and the delivery of images via 'Visuallab', a website for undergraduate students, and the 'Virtual Visual Literacy Project', which delivers some of the same content to participants in the university's continuing education programme.

2. Background

The University College Cork (UCC) is one of four constituent universities that make up the National University of Ireland. In 2001 UCC brought in Professor Alistair Rowan, recently retired from the Edinburgh College of Art, to establish a new department to teach the History of Art. Once this was achieved he retired and was succeeded, in 2003, by Professor James Elkins from the Art Institute of Chicago. History of Art is a small department affiliated to the college's Department of History. Currently, it has a part-time professor (Elkins), two full-time lecturing staff, a few part-time lecturers and tutors, and a secretary and visual resources officer (both part-time). Undergraduate students number about 110 in the first year, 50 in the second, and 25 in the third. There are eight postgraduate students.

3. Finding and making images

Since History of Art is such an image-intensive discipline, an important early task was to gather together a collection of teaching images. The department would have preferred to create one large digital collection, but this was not possible, due to the constraints of resources and copyright. As a result, the department was forced to rely on several different sources and formats.

The university had an existing slide collection of about 12,000 images, which were brought out of storage and sorted through. The majority had been purchased from Scala, an Italian-based publisher of slides and art history books. To these were added several thousand more slide images from Professor Rowan's own personal collection. The latter were largely architectural images, since Rowan is a notable architectural historian. Further slide images have been added since by staff making overseas study trips, particularly to Italy, since Italian art and architecture has been an important focus of the department's teaching.

The department has begun digitising its slide collection, but this has been limited to images for which they have or can obtain copyright permission. Out of a total slide collection of about 20,000 images, approximately 3,000 have been digitised.

By the time the department was established there were already some good collections of art available on the web, so it was clear that these could play a useful part in meeting the department's image needs. Where the department has been unable to produce its own digital images, it has located and linked to images from online collections and websites. The department also took out a trial subscription to the AMICO collection but found that it didn't offer sufficient coverage for UCC's courses. They are still investigating other subscription options.

Professor Elkins' appointment in 2003 led to a greater emphasis on new media (i.e. born-digital) art works. As a result, the production of new slides ceased and the digitisation of existing slides was wound down, with most of the resources being put towards the development of online materials and the purchase or licensing of new digital media works. The department is intending to buy a digital camera, which will enable direct-to-digital capture of historical art works and architecture when staff go on overseas study trips.

So, although the department would have preferred to have a large electronic collection suitable for all its needs, it is currently having to make do with a mixed collection, including the following formats and sources:

• Printed books
• Commercial slides
• Slides taken by department staff
• Images digitised from slides
• Image linked-to on the web
• Licensed digital images
• 'Born-digital' images

This pragmatic mix is common to other History of Art image collections and is likely to persist until there are 'digital slide licenses' (ie licenses enabling educational copying and distribution of images) or suitably comprehensive subscription collections available.

4. Coordinating the image collection

When the department was formed in 2001, a half time (16.5 hrs) post of Visual Resources Officer (VRO) was established to coordinate the development and use of an image collection for the department. This post is currently held by James Cronin, who provided most of the information for this case study. Cronin came to this new role from a broadcasting and teaching background, with qualifications in the arts (English, History and Iconography) and in broadcast media. In addition to coordinating the image resources for the History of Art Department, he coordinates an Art History diploma course for UCC's continuing education programme (discussed further below).

The Visual Resources Officer's job description is extremely broad, including: photography, slide mounting and digitisation, website creation and management, supervision of slide borrowing, preparation of exam papers and the use of AV and multimedia equipment. As the students and department have expanded, an increasing amount of time has been taken up in providing user support. A recent challenge has been meeting the image needs of several History of Art students with visual impairments.

With limited time and the need to build up a teaching resource quickly, Cronin has had to take a fairly pragmatic approach to getting things done - including relying on teaching staff to help with the organisation and labelling of slides related to their subject interests. As the digital images are solely intended for screen delivery or digital projection, most of the slides are scanned at a fairly low resolution (250-300 dpi to give 640 x 480 pixel images), although higher resolutions are used where details of an artwork are required. Slides are scanned directly into Adobe Photoshop using a Canoscan FS4000US film scanner.

The slides are organised and labelled using a scheme devised by Dr Flavio Boggi, one of the department's lecturers. It records Place, Name of the work, Artist/Architect, and Date. The digital images are currently being catalogued using Extensis Portfolio with a simple metadata schema based on the Dublin Core standard. In the future the department hopes to develop an Intranet-based image repository.

At least half of the Visual Resources Officer's time is spent developing the department's 'Visuallab' website, to which we now turn.

5. Delivering the images

The Visuallab website complements the department's teaching programme. Web pages are put up the week following each lecture. They are used to reinforce the teaching and develop the students' visual literacy, and as preparation for slide tests, which form an important part of each course's assessment. In these tests students are shown unlabelled art works and required to identify and interpret them.

On Monday mornings the VRO prepares a selection of images and texts relating to the previous week's lectures. These are captioned and coded up for the website and are made publicly available by the end of Wednesday. The Visuallab's pages include a mix of digitised images, links and pdf texts, with the site organised by year, then course, then week. Of the images in Visuallab, approximately 80% are digitised from the slide collection or other sources, with the remaining 20% linked to on the web. Images are typically of a modest size (350 pixels across the longest edge), and are given full captions. They are presented within templated, hand-coded HTML, using frames and thumbnails to provide navigation (see the screenshot below).

Visuallab (images courtesy of UCC History of Art)

In addition to its History of Art degree courses, the University College of Cork offers a Diploma of European Art History through its Centre of Adult Continuing Education.

Alongside his role as Visual Resources Officer, Cronin works within the Centre of Adult Continuing Education as Coordinator of the Art History Diploma. In this capacity he has created and maintains another website for diploma students called the Virtual Visual Literacy Project (VVLP) . This draws on the same images and links collected for the History of Art Department, but includes a lot of additional material to support the teaching of the course (lecture notes, assignments etc). It contains more web links than digitised resources (80% links to 20% digitised images, compared with the 20/80 split for the Visuallab).

The VVLP used to be delivered using the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment. However, as little of its functionality was being used and students found it difficult to manage the passwords and navigate the resources, the VVLP was transferred to a simple website along similar lines to the Visuallab. The screenshot below shows the VVLP's introductory page.

Virtual Visual Literacy Project (images courtesy of UCC History of Art)

The VVLP has been well received by students and was given an award for Research on Innovative Forms of Teaching and Learning from the Irish Higher Education Authority's Targeted Initiatives Scheme. This award has provided funding to investigate the VVLP's teaching potential and to further develop the resource.

Online learning and teaching has been a new experience for some of the Art History Diploma lecturers and has yet to be fully embedded within their teaching practice. While they recognise the administrative advantages, staff have been concerned that students would become overly reliant on the Internet and neglect to use other resources. This fear has not been borne out by student surveys.

6. Future plans

As the Virtual Visual Literacy Project develops, it is likely that workshops will be offered for staff and tutors to enable them to use online resources more effectively. Ultimately it is hoped that all lecturers on the course will have the skills - and the images - to deliver their lectures entirely in PowerPoint.

The History of Art Department has similar goals: to provide its staff with training in using digital images and to ensure they have all the images they need to deliver their courses digitally. This is going to be a challenge as the department teaches more courses covering post-modern and contemporary art, since these images are well within copyright and are only available on the web as small or poor quality reproductions. The university has recently established a new gallery, the Glucksman, with a focus on contemporary art and new media. The History of Art Department hopes that its links with the gallery might provide it with a good source of high quality images for use within its teaching programme.

7. Conclusion

The Cork experience illustrates some of the challenges departments face in trying to provide teaching images within this transitional phase. 'Transitional' in the sense that useful images exist in both analogue and digital forms, with the lack of suitable copyright licenses making digitisation difficult, and digital subscription collections not adequate or affordable enough to meet all teaching needs. While this case study is from Ireland, the UK experience is similar - although there are efforts underway to address both the copyright licensing issues and the provision of art image collections.

Faced with these challenges, UCC has adopted a simple and pragmatic approach: digitising or licensing images where it could and supplementing these with analogue (slide) images and with web links. The development of this image collection is demand-driven, with resources sourced or scanned as they are needed by teaching staff. Delivery is similarly pragmatic, using web technologies in a simple, yet effective way.

For more information about the Visuallab and Virtual Visual Literacy Project, please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).