Society of Architectural Historians
1365 N. Astor Street
Chicago, IL 60610

T: 312.573.1365 F: 312.573.1141 www.sah.org <http://www.sah.org/>

*
FOR IMMEIDATE RELEASE CONTACT: Pauline Saliga, SAH April 17, 2008
Executive Director T: 312.573.1365 [log in to unmask]*

*The Society of Architectural Historians Receives Generous Grant from
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Develop Online Library of
Architectural Images*

*
Chicago, IL*-April 15, 2008 The *Society of Architectural Historians**
(SAH)*, the leading international learned society that promotes the
study, interpretation and preservation of the built environment
worldwide, has received a generous grant from *The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation* to develop the SAH Architecture Visual Resource Network (SAH
AVRN) a dynamic online library of architectural and landscape images for
research and teaching. The grant, which follows a 2006 planning grant
from the Mellon Foundation, marks a new era in which the Society will
both collect and provide access to digital images to support research
and pedagogy. Commenting on receipt of the grant, *SAH President and
Philip Johnson Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of
Modern Art, Barry Bergdoll* observed, “The fact that the Mellon
Foundation has turned its attention to the issues surrounding digital
resources in the field of architectural history is very important both
for SAH and the discipline as a whole. I look forward to working closely
with the SAH board as we research solutions that will be beneficial for
SAH and the field of architectural history and its related disciplines.”

The need for planning in this area was articulated in a Scholarly
Communication Institute (SCI 4) that was sponsored by The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation and held at the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville, July 30-August 1, 2006. As described by *Richard
Lucier, the Director of SCI*, the focus the Scholarly Communication
Institutes is to provide “an opportunity for leaders in scholarly
disciplines, academic libraries, advanced technologies, and higher
education administration to study, develop, and implement institutional
and discipline-based strategies to advance scholarly communication in
the context of the ongoing digital revolution.” The SCI that was held in
2006 focused specifically on the field of architectural history and the
‘grand challenges’ facing architectural historians as they seek to
integrate new and emerging technologies into their research and teaching.

To develop content for SAH AVRN, SAH is collaborating with scholars and
librarians from partner institutions, initially MIT, Brown University
and the University of Virginia. It is the expectation that SAH AVRN will
change the way Visual Resources and Art/Architecture Librarians at those
institutions conduct their work. Instead of developing separate,
independent collections of architectural images for each institution,
librarians will contribute images and metadata to SAH AVRN, a shared
resource that will be widely available. Initially images will be
contributed to SAH AVRN by scholars at the same three institutions who
have agreed to share thousands of their own images that were taken for
research and pedagogical purposes.

To develop the technology for this online resource, SAH is working
closely with ARTstor, the digital library of more than 725,000 images
that serves the fields of art and architectural history, the humanities
and social sciences. Building upon the existing ARTstor platform for
storage, retrieval, viewing and presentation of images, ARTstor is going
to develop two new tools to be used in conjunction with SAH AVRN. The
first is a tool that will enable scholars, practitioners, librarians and
others to contribute images to the shared resource of SAH AVRN. The
second set of tools will be a content management system that will enable
sophisticated processing and management of those images. These tools
will be made available on an open source basis. The launch of SAH AVRN
1.0 will be April 1, 2009 at the SAH Annual Meeting in Pasadena,
California. Thereafter, enhancements to the SAH AVRN user interface and
tools will be unveiled at the following two SAH Annual Meetings in
Chicago (April 2010) and New Orleans (April 2011).

The expectation for developing SAH AVRN is that scholars, librarians and
institutional leadership will join together to create a shared online
resource that will both enrich the field of architectural history and
create a new collaborative work model for visual resources and
art/architecture libraries. For the first time, instead of creating
repetitive digital archives at each individual university, the SAH AVRN
will enable collaboration resulting in the creation of a highly
authoritative resource with global coverage that will support new
research and scholarly publications, and enhance university-level
teaching. As *SAH* *AVRN Project Director and Head of the Rotch Library
at MIT, Ann Whiteside,* commented, “The library, museum, and visual
resources communities have a history around the building of digital
collections and standards and laid the ground work that will support
AVRN as it develops. AVRN offers the opportunity for the library and
visual resources communities to work collaboratively with scholars to
build a shared repository of visual content in an unprecedented manner.
The issues around digital collection building in which many libraries
are already involved, such as standards for describing digital content,
and the ability to harvest metadata through standardized protocols, such
as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), will all be put to the test
throughout Phase 1 of the SAH AVRN.”

Given the complexity of building this online resource, the AVRN will be
developed in phases. The SAH AVRN will be developed in the next three
years as an online library of images that will include a vast range of
digital media, from photographs and moving images to computer-generated
drawings, QTVR panoramas, and 3-D models. The AVRN digital library also
will include content from disciplines that overlap the history of
architecture, such as landscape history, vernacular architecture,
urbanism, decorative arts, design history, construction, and
engineering. At the end of three years, AVRN will have developed into a
continuously-expanding collection of thousands of architectural images
and the ingest, content management, and search/display tools that are
being customized for AVRN will have gone through several iterations.

The Society of Architectural Historians is developing SAH AVRN because
it holds enormous promise for both research and teaching. Commenting on
SAH AVRN, *Dietrich Neumann, incoming SAH President and Professor of
Architectural History and Urban Studies at Yale and Brown Universities*,
stated “As a reliable database with authoritative information as well as
superb high resolution images, panoramas and film clips of important
buildings and urban environments, AVRN will substantially change and
improve the way the history, present and future of the built environment
is taught and understood. The availability of digital imagery, panorama
photography and film, today presents a technological revolution for
teaching that is as significant as the introduction of lantern slides
was 100 years ago. For the first time in the history of our field, we
can appropriately present architecture and urban spaces with their
spatial complexities. Due to a very sophisticated approach to the
creation of metadata, this fast expanding database will allow the
researcher to ask quantitative questions, allow the creation of
typologies, the tracing of the distribution of building types, and the
transfer and metamorphosis of architectural and structural ideas over
time and space. We expect fundamental methodological changes in our field.”

*/About SAH: /*/The Society of Architectural Historians is the leading
international not-for-profit organization that promotes the study,
interpretation, and preservation of the built environment worldwide.
Founded in 1940, the Society is an Illinois 501 (c ) (3 ) tax exempt
membership organization that has 3,500 members in North America and
around the world. To learn more about the Society, please visit
www.sah.org <http://www.sah.org/>/

--
Ann Whiteside
Head, Rotch Library of Architecture & Planning
MIT - Room 7-238
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-258-5594
Fax: 617-253-9331
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Past President, ARLIS/NA
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Cataloging Cultural Objects
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