Friday 26 January 2007

Up close


One of the challenges we're facing with our website redevelopment at work is how to maximise the presentation of images of works in our collections - from maps to miniatures to panorama photos to pots.

Someone recommended the FAMSF's (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's) ImageBase to me last night, for its zoom functionality.

FAMSF ImageBase

ImageBase uses Zoomify, a Flash-based application, to display high-resolution images online. The image quality is fantastic. Zoomify is also being used by the Library of Congress and the Getty.

One of the other interesting things about ImageBase is that they've employed descriptive keywords in their search functionality. So in addition to searching by typical cataloguing terms, like artist name, or date, or medium, you can search by the kind of words that you might use to describe the work less formally - the work at the top of the post, for example, has key words including stylish, leggy, young, clad and loosely - all good words for John Buckland Wright.

Image: John Buckland Wright, Jeune Fille Accroupie, 1929. Wood Engraving. Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. See more details here.

No comments: