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Columns::October 15, 2001
Golden opportunity
Annual homecoming rituals celebrate ‘New Year--New Memories
Louise McBee Lecture examines ways to enrich college experience
Online and accessible
Moore College will be rededicated as new home of Honors Program
‘A mediated version of horror’
Public relations professor bridges the gap between intent and action
School of Music names new director
Coach named for new equestrian program
Newsmakers
Campus News
American art history photos will be digitized
By Jean Cleveland
jclevela@uga.edu
A $155,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation will assist the UGA Libraries and the Lamar Dodd School of Art in digitizing a photographic documentation of the history of American art and architecture. The collection has been the principal source of images for teaching American art history for more than four decades.
The Carnegie Study of the Arts of the United States was initiated in 1956 by Lamar Dodd, then-chairman of the UGA School of Art, and funded by the Carnegie Foundation. The study’s objective was to create a collection of images that would support the teaching of American art; the result was a collection of 4,551 images that still represent the highest standard of photo-documentation of American art. Staff at the art school, who have been stewards of the collection for the intervening decades, collaborated with the libraries on efforts to secure the grant.
For many years, the slide collection was available for sale to educational institutions, but it has been out of circulation since 1998 due to the sale of the company which handled reproduction and distribution. The Mellon-funded project will culminate in access to the collection through ArtSTOR, an online database of educational and scholarly images, and GALILEO, the University System of Georgia’s online library.
“Because these images continue to be critical to the teaching of the arts of the United States, access to digital versions of these images over the Internet would represent a major achievement in support of American art studies,” says William Gray Potter, the university librarian at UGA. “It would significantly enhance the expanding body of digital materials available to teachers, students and scholars working in this field.”
Funded by the Mellon Foundation, ArtSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization that develops, “stores,” and distributes electronically digital images and related scholarly materials for the study of art, architecture, and other fields in the humanities, with a goal of providing a reliable digital library of images for the teaching of art history.
“ArtSTOR will alleviate the need for individuals and institutions to redundantly create and catalog digital images, thus saving those institutions valuable resources,” says Max Marmor, director of collections development for ArtSTOR.
A primary concern of the initial project was to build an image collection using state-of-the-art technology, says Carmon Colangelo, director of the UGA School of Art.
Dodd hired professionals to photograph the objects on color transparencies using sophisticated large-format 4x5 cameras. Two sets of transparencies were made, with the second set being sealed and refrigerated so when new technology evolved the images could be taken to the next generation.
“This was a remarkable achievement that results in the collection being of practical and historical value more than four decades after the project was conceived,” Colangelo says. “Being especially rich in decorative arts and architecture, the Carnegie corpus will make a special contribution to regional studies, especially of the 17th-19th centuries. It is also unusually rich in Native American materials for its age.”
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