Celebrating Fine Art Education and Practice in the UK: digital curation and the digital museum
Polly Christie, Surrey Institute of Art & Design, United Kingdom
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/fineart

Demonstration: Your Colleagues - 2

The National Fine Art Education Digital Collection has been developed in the UK, using the Council for National Academic Awards Collection as a core, (including pieces by important figures in British Art such as Henry Moore, Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton). The collection has then been augmented by selecting works from UK Higher Education Institution, bringing the collection total to around 300 pieces of art and 200 artists? records. By enriching the records further and contextualising the collection, the resource has charted, for the first time, the history and achievement of the artist practitioner in UK fine art education, from its inception in the 1850s, up until the present day, where UK art schools are at the cutting edge of time-based new media.

In demonstrating the website, the challenges of digitising using a distributed model will be apparent, and the protocols and benchmarks that have been set during the course of the project will be disseminated. Such protocols have been developed adhering to internationally recognised standards and as such are re-usable both to enhance this collection, and to be adopted by other projects of a similar nature.

The website itself promotes the best way to capture and display works of art in a digital setting, as well as how best to curate or organise the pieces in the digital gallery. As with traditional analogue gallery spaces, the curator?s remit as custodian of the collection is implicit, and the challenges of digital curation are explored.

[please note that the URL cited above details the pilot project - by March 03, the actual Fine Art Education website will be ready to demonstrate.]