The University of Kansas is pleased to announce that more than 8,000 digital images depicting more than 7,000 objects from the permanent collection at the Spencer Museum of Art are now available to anyone with Internet access. This digital collection currently represents less than 30 percent of the museum's collection, which numbers more than 26,000 objects. The digital collection will continue to grow over the next year, and information on objects will be regularly updated as new scholarly research is generated. These digital images provide educators, researchers and art enthusiasts worldwide with unprecedented access to the museum's collection.
The rapidly growing virtual collection is a collaborative project between the Spencer and the University's Scholarly Digital Initiatives program. The Spencer is digitally documenting its collection with funding from a variety of sources, including a $149,061 grant from the Institute of Museum & Library Services, an independent federal agency. Supported by KU's Information Services, this ongoing project will result in access to digital images and electronic records of the entire collection.
"The Spencer Museum of Art is delighted to make the riches of its collections digitally available to KU students, faculty, and the larger community of researchers through this collaboration with the Scholarly Digital Initiatives program," says Spencer Museum of Art Director Saralyn Reece Hardy. "The digital copies will enhance appreciation of the original objects in our collections and at the same time make the collections more useful for classroom teaching and faculty research."
The Spencer Museum of Art's collection is available online through the KU Libraries' Image Gateway at http://www.lib.ku.edu/imagegateway. Visitors to the site can search for objects through a variety of data, including artist's name, material and date of creation. Additional collections of images are also available through the Image Gateway, including art historical images licensed from Saskia and from the National Palace Museum, Taipei; artifacts from the Kansas City Hopewell Archaeological Sites from KU's Anthropological Research and Teaching Collections; historic photographs from the Kenneth Spencer Research Library's Kansas Collection; and images of wildflowers from the Kansas Biological Survey.
"Using digital technology to make the materials of cultural and artistic heritage more accessible and more useful to learning and teaching is Information Service's mission," said Denise Stephens, Vice Provost for Information Services. "We are pleased to be able to partner with the Spencer Museum in this way."
Workshops on searching the image collections and creating presentations will be scheduled in July and August for KU students and faculty. For dates and times check the list of Instructional Services Workshops at http://www.lib.ku.edu/instruction.
Sofia Galarza Liu
Spencer Museum of Art, collection manager
785.864.0146, reina@ku.edu
Holly Mercer
KU Libraries, Coordinator of Digital Content Development
785.864.8913, hmercer@ku.edu
Deb Ludwig
Information Technology, Director of Enterprise Academic Systems
785.864.1376, dludwig@ku.edu
Copyright © 2008 by the University of Kansas
