Enhanced Access to Image Resources: Visual Arts Data Service
Phill Purdy, Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College, United Kingdom
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk

Demonstration: Your Colleagues - 1

The Visual Arts Data Service(VADS)is a UK based on-line visual arts digital archive of university, museum & archive collections. VADS will demonstrate two new 'learning & teaching friendly' features available on its web-service in 2003. These will enable greater pedagogic use of VADS expanding high quality digital image collections, (currently 13 collections totalling over 16000 images of relevance to fine & applied arts; crafts; design & architecture).

The two new features are a 'lightbox', where the user has personal space to manage and present their chosen images, and a visual search, (Content Based Image Retrieval - CBIR) where the user can perform purely image based, non text-searching.

The Lightbox has been developed by VADS to give users a personal space on the website where they can store selected images, 'save and compare', annotate and email them. The Lightbox also allows for the email recipient to 'adopt' the Lightbox and images they have been sent.

Content Based Image Retrieval has been an exciting development in search engine technology, allowing for users to search on the colour, shape and contrast of an image as opposed to using text / keywords or text-based browsing structures to find images.