[Insightl] Insight and Saskia

[John Taormina]

David,

Our first group of images in Insight was a set of licensed Saskia 
images. Duke (specifically the main library) purchased the 2500-image 
set on Western Art for Art and Art History's startup collection in 
the Duke Imagebase. The images are excellent. I think our group cost 
around $17000, based on the number of images, the resolution, file 
type, and the student population size of our campus.

Since this was our startup group in 2002, Luna was putting together 
our first data model and uploaded the images. Saskia sent the images 
directly to Luna on DVDs and then sent the metadata to me in an Excel 
spreadsheet.  I then went in and cleaned up and mapped the data to 
fit our model and then sent the spreadsheet to Luna.

Now, we would be doing all mapping, migrating, and uploading in-house 
so Saskia would send the DVDs directly to us, as I develop the data; 
the library then uploads the data and images into the Duke Imagebase. 
I used Saskia's file names  that first time, since I didn't get the 
images first to work with, but would change that to our  digital 
accession number/digital file name (ObjectID)  if I had the DVDs in 
hand. The Saskia number would then get recorded in another field, 
Source, along with the license agreement information under Rights.

Currently, all of our data records for images in Insight are migrated 
from our cataloging database, which is based on the VRA Core, as 
individual records per image (to answer John Miller's question): full 
view, details, etc.  The VRA Core is based on a Work-Image 
relationship (Work=original work of art; Image=surrogate).  That type 
of system would first need to be set up in the database being used. 
We select a limited number of fields to map to Insight. I'm not sure 
how much relationship building is needed for Insight images since a 
Keyword search on a title should  access all images related to it. 
Perhaps other Insight users who have set up their model differently 
could comment on this?

If I could license all of Saskia's catalog, I would. (Columbia just 
did.) It is far superior to scanning existing slides and Saskia's 
image quality is of the highest order. They have always had the 
highest reputation as an image provider.  Renate and Kurt Weidenhoeft 
are great to work with, and they will accommodate specific needs. 
They have also worked with Luna so know what is needed for Insight.

Hope this helps.

John

>What kind of experiences have folks had with adding a Saskia 
>collection to Insight?
>
>David Austin
>Curator CITY2000
>_______________________________________________
>Insightl mailing list
>Insightl at mailman.yale.edu
>http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/insightl


-- 
John J. Taormina
Director, Visual Resources Center
Dept. of Art and Art History
Duke University
Box 90764
112 East Duke Building
Durham  NC 27708-0764

Ph: 919-684-2501
E-mail: taormina at duke.edu
http://www.duke.edu/web/art/

Editor, Visual Resources Association Bulletin
http://www.vraweb.org