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VISION Project for Shared Visual Resources Records
--a Joint Effort of VRA and RLG with Getty Support
Oberlin, Ohio, and Mountain View, Calif., November 14, 1997--The Visual
Resources Association (VRA) and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) are
pleased to announce a new collaboration, the VISION project. This effort
is designed to bring more visual resources information online;
promulgate and test the use of standards for creating and sharing such
information; and evaluate the new data's value in the context of
existing RLG research information databases. Support from the Getty
Information Institute helps make this possible.
"The VISION project should help demonstrate the rich potential for
cultural heritage research in a database that combines museum object and
visual resources catalog records," says Joseph Romano, president of the
Visual Resources Association. "Most visual resources collections contain
slides and photographs that document the physical state of museum-held
objects at a specific time: a painting before or after it has been
cleaned, an outdoor sculpture in its original location, and so on.
VISION will place cataloging for these visual documents in the same file
with cataloging for the objects themselves--with links to images on the
Web."
In the VISION (Visual Resources Sharing Information Online Network)
project, 32 VRA members will use a template on the World Wide Web, based
on the VRA Data Standards Committee's "Core Categories for Visual
Resources, Version 2.0," to catalog photographs and slides of
museum-held art objects. This template will be the first implementation
of the Core Categories standard. More information about the Core
Categories and the VISION project is given at the VRA's Web site, at
http://www.oberlin.edu/~art/vra/dsc.html.
Through the template and RLG software, both developed with the aid of
Getty Information Institute funding, VISION records will be converted
into a data stream that parallels or complements data coming from the
RLG REACH (Record Export for Art and Cultural Heritage) project.
(The other REACH project participants--11 museums and 4 collection
management system vendors--are contributing existing machine-readable
data from heterogeneous museum collection management systems that
catalog objects such as paintings, sculpture, and other museum objects.
More about the RLG-Getty REACH project can be found at RLG's Web site,
http://www.rlg.org/reach.html. For more about the Getty Information
Institute, visit the Web site http://www.gii.getty.edu.)
VISION and REACH records will both go into a new RLG union catalog for
museum objects and image records, accessible through the Web. The value
of this new testbed file will be enhanced by its collocation with other
online art resources from RLG and the Getty Information Institute (the
RLIN bibliographic union catalog, the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, and
such CitaDel files as the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals,
Bibliography of the History of Art, and SCIPIO: Art and Rare Book Sales
Catalogs)--to which the Getty Information Institute's Union List of
Artist Names (ULAN) will
be added.
PROJECT GOALS
The VISION project has three specific goals:
1. Demonstrate the application of standards for improving access to
cultural heritage information, specifically the VRA Core Categories for
Visual Resources, the Union List of Artist Names, and the Art &
Architecture Thesaurus.
2. Determine how much the process of providing access to visual
resources can be accelerated by sharing cataloging through RLG's
information management and retrieval infrastructure.
3. Test the overall usefulness of access to visual resources records
within a Web-based information environment such as RLG's, which provides
a robust search engine for accessing a variety of cultural heritage
information.
PROJECT PARTICIPATION
The initial nucleus of VISION contributors, comprising both RLG
members and other institutions, will create records representing a
variety of subject matter (fine arts, ethnographic collections, the
built environment, etc.) in several formats (slides, photo archives,
digital images). There may be opportunities for additional contributors
to participate in later phases of the project.
In spring 1998, a VISION Evaluation Advisory Group will work closely
with the VISION contributors to evaluate and analyze the results of the
project. Individuals interested in participating in this evaluation are
invited to contact one of the project coordinators:
Elisa Lanzi
Chair, VRA/Data Standards Committee
Lanzi/Warren Associates
phone: 802-442-1570
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
VRA Web: www.vra.oberlin.edu
Katharine Martinez
Research Libraries Group
phone: 650-691-2231
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
RLG Web: www.rlg.org