----------------------------Original message----------------------------
[Please note the following correction in the VISION press release:
"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
works of art, architecture, and other cultural heritage artifacts."
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Elisa Lanzi ]
<<<<<<<<<<<<<NEW, REVISED>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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
works of art, architecture, and other cultural heritage artifacts. 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
