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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Cataloging Cultural Objects
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