Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.31664/zu.2019.105.08
The Fine Arts Archives: Two Decades of Digitized Art History
Jasenka Ferber Bogdan
; Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Fine Arts Archives, Zagreb, Croatia
Andreja Der-Hazarijan Vukić
orcid.org/0000-0002-8362-4542
; Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Fine Arts Archives, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Established as the first documentation centre and archive for national art history, the Fine Arts Archives at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts have been continuously developing their information system and support for experts and the scholarly community. In this paper, we will present the history of the Archives’ automation process, which started in 1995—from simple Excel tables and Access databases created for the Archives’ specific needs to a complex open-access repository platform, developed as a resource for the growing field of digital art history. Digital technology has been continuously providing new and faster ways of retrieving archival information—from simple concept searches of several offline databases to the more advanced possibilities of online search based on semantic web technology. The Fine Arts Archives went online in 2009 via DiZbi, an institutional repository platform, which for the first time established connection between the digitized textual and visual sources of different Academy units. In order to present digital objects in a more vivid and interactive way, new digital content has been created through virtual exhibitions as one of the visually appealing portal features. An ongoing process of digitization of archival holdings has opened up new opportunities for collaboration with national and international institutions through several projects. Future plans include a long-term project with the potential of developing into a digital infrastructure for provenance research. Based on our experiences with these digital projects, we argue that art information professionals are playing an increasingly important role in raising the visibility of Croatian art history, both nationally and internationally, and in facilitating new forms of digital art historical analyses.
Keywords
art archives; digitization; repository platform; virtual exhibition; metadata standards; digital art history; provenance research
Hrčak ID:
233176
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2019.
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