Developments in Electronic Image Databases

for Art History [1993]

Jennifer Durran

Abstract
Surrogate images are indispensable tools for the study of art history.
The provision of these surrogates has traditionally been in the form
of the photographic reproduction. The potential exists for the
creation of databases of electronic surrogate images. This paper
examines some recent developments in this direction in European
and American libraries, museums and educational institutions,
ranging from prototypes to small, successfully implemented
systems. The widespread development of large-scale digital image
databases is however impeded by a number of factors such as
insufficient understanding of user needs, a lack of standards for
intellectual access, image quality and information interchange,
rapidly changing technology, copyright restrictions, high costs, and
uncertain funding. Relevant initiatives to resolve these problems are
noted.

1. Introduction
As VALA (Victorian Association for Library Automation) Travel
Scholar 1992, I visited fourteen libraries, museums and universities
in England, France and the United States to investigate recent
developments in imaging technologies and their use in the provision
of visual information specifically for art history. I was able to study a
range of systems and meet with those responsible for their
development and operation. In addition, I attended the Electronic
Imaging and the Visual Arts Conference and Exhibition held in
London. My investigations were concerned primarily with image
capture and processing, methods of combining text and image,
analogue versus digital storage, hardware and software options,
telecommunications, and management issues. Further research was
carried out at the Clearinghouse on Art Documentation and
Computerization, Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.

2. Art History and the Need for Surrogate

Images
Art history is a branch of the humanities concerned with the study of
works of art (such as paintings, sculpture and architecture), their
history, construction and meaning as cultural products. Within the
discipline there are a number of approaches, but each depends to a

© Jennifer Durran 1993 1

greater or lesser extent upon the availability of surrogate images,
i.e. visual substitutes that approximate the art works as closely as
possible.

Since its development in the mid-19th century, the photographic

reproduction has become one of the indispensable tools of the art
historian. It provides a solution to some of the problems of studying
art works: there are enormous numbers of them, estimated between
ten million and three billion worldwide (Roberts,1986: 30), only a
small selection of works owned by museums are on display at any
one time, the physical arrangement of works in museums prevents
the visitor from making their own comparisons between related
items and, for obvious security and preservation reasons, it is not
possible for objects to be handled by those who wish to learn more
about them. Art works in private collections are rarely accessible to
the researcher or student, usually never to the public. Many works
have been lost, stolen or destroyed and are known only by surrogate
images.

Over the last century, comprehensive visual archives have been

assembled by individuals, commercial photographic companies,
museums and libraries. These collections of photographic
reproductions have generally been arranged in very idiosyncratic
ways to suit the conditions unique to their owning institutions.
Automation has been introduced into some areas but bibliographic
control, access and dissemination are still limited. In comparison to
the sophisticated developments in text storage and distribution, the
continuing provision of visual material solely in the form of slides
and photographs is "distinctly archaic" (Hamber, 1991: 30), yet
these forms continue to be the standards by which electronic
alternatives are judged.

Clearly, the potential exists for the creation and use of image
databases in art history but, at this stage, the problems are many
and difficult, but not insurmountable. Defining clearly user needs,
developing standards for describing visual materials and clarifying
copyright and intellectual property obligations are just some of the
issues that must be addressed. General trends in technology and
telecommunications are promising, as are developments in other
areas such as medical and scientific visual information systems,
digital photography and pre-press.

3. Recent Developments
Since the mid-1980s, there has been a noticeable surge of activity in
the area of electronic imaging for art history. Many of these projects
have failed to be developed beyond the prototype stage, but it is
obvious that the technology is slowly being shaped to meet the very
specific needs of this field. New work continues to be undertaken

© Jennifer Durran 1993 2

predominantly by museums and galleries, libraries as well as by
teaching and research institutions.

Museum Public-Access Information Systems

The one area where systems have been developed and successfully
implemented is in museums and galleries. These systems are
designed primarily for members of the public who wish to learn
more about the art works they have seen on display and how they
relate to the history of art as a whole.

The Micro Gallery is a highly successful interactive guide to the

painting collection of the National Gallery, London. Launched in
1991, the system has attracted high levels of interest both from the
public and the media where it has been reviewed extensively. Whilst
not exactly 'new', I mention it here because it continues to dominate
the field and has been selected as a model for other museum
public-access systems. The basis of the system is the complete
painting catalogue which contains a high-quality, full-size
reproduction of each of the 2,200 paintings in the Gallery's
permanent collection. Some works have animated sequences which
help to illustrate particular aspects explained in the text. Four
sections allow access in different ways. The Artist section allows
access to all paintings in the collection by a selected artist as well as
providing biographical information. Historical Atlas of Western
European Art allows access by geographical place and historical
period. Picture Type allows a user to see the collection in terms of
different genres. General Reference has short entries on key terms
and subjects. Each of these sections is illustrated by active
thumbnails (i.e. small, low-resolution images for browsing) from
which the user can then elect to see full-size images and catalogue
entries. There are extensive hypertext links allowing users to cross
from one section to another and to navigate through the 2,200 high-
quality illustrations, 12,000 secondary illustrations and 300,000
words of supporting text.

The Micro Gallery is installed on 12 stand-alone workstations

comprising an Apple Macintosh IIfx with 8Mbyte RAM and 1.3Gbyte
hard disc drive. Display is via a high-resolution monitor. All images
were scanned originally in 24 bit and the master images stored on
erasable magneto- optical discs. Even using the JPEG compression
algorithm, the response time for these images to be displayed was
slower than the one second specified so eventually, with some
customisation, 8 bit images were used. The provision of hard copy
images is important and whilst the user currently can print most
images in black and white, the demand for colour is growing
stronger.

© Jennifer Durran 1993 3

I was able to see the prototype versions of two systems being
developed on this model. The Micro Gallery at the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, is, like the Micro Gallery, London also to be
funded by American Express. From the small demonstration I saw of
this prototype, it promises to be a more elegant version than the
original. The prototype has three components; the first being the
creation of 20 features (i.e. animations or special effects) based on
approximately five art works. I viewed one of these features on Jan
van Eyck's The Annunciation and was impressed by the way it dealt
with aspects of the painting such as symbolism and perspective as
well as with a simulated restoration of the work. The second
component will be a thematic approach to the collection; the third,
an index. The San Diego Museum of Art's IMAGE (Interactive
Multimedia Art Guide) deals with only the 200 most important works
in the Museum's collection. Each work will be represented by a
catalogue entry, accompanying illustration and background
information. There will be in-depth interactive features for at least
30 art works. One of these features, which cleverly shows the
perspective in a still life painting by Juan Sánchez Cotán, was
demonstrated at the EVA conference. The system, when
implemented, is envisaged as being equivalent to "an infinitely
patient, highly-knowledgeable, entertaining and superbly-equipped
art history teacher"! (Witchey and Morrison, 1983: 61).

Resources for scholarly research

Museum public information systems are of little use to the
professional art historian who requires access to greater numbers of
high quality images, greater flexibility during the search process and
freedom to investigate his/her own connections between images.
The Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known to the
Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, London comprises a text
database of 45,000 records and an analogue videodisc of 25,000
high quality black-and-white images. It offers great depth of
information and accommodates a wide range of materials for
scholars in the fields of art history, architecture and archaeology.
Launched in March 1992, it was received with enthusiasm by
scholars although reservations were expressed about the lack of
coverage in certain areas, which will be addressed in the future. The
extent to which a project like this could ever be "completed" is
debatable.

The workstation comprises a monitor for text and two videodisc

players with identical videodiscs. For retrieval of information, the
system uses highly complex query screens which would take even
an expert in the field some time to master. A search could recall, for
example, a photograph of an ancient monument, a depiction of the
same monument done during the Renaissance, and the transcription

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of a related text, each on a separate screen to allow in- depth
analysis, comparison of styles, tracing of influences, etc.

Electronic Publishing
The Census was the only analogue image system I saw that had
been completed in the last year or so. Generally speaking, it would
appear that this technology has little to offer art history in the
1990s. Even the area where it made some headway in the 1980s,
electronic publishing, seems to have been taken over by digital
media such a CD-I and CD-TV. A number of CD-I art titles such as
The Renaissance of Florence and Harvest of the Sun (Vincent van
Gogh) have been released by Philips. A CD version of the Micro
Gallery (London) is due to be published later this year.

In 1983 the National Gallery of Art, Washington was the first

museum to release an analogue videodisc of its collection. It was a
highly successful venture and in 1991, the institution began a new
publication on its American art collection. In the eight years since
the first disc was produced, the limitations of analogue storage had
been learned and it was acknowledged that to use this technology
again would have been a mistake (Perlin, 1992). The new videodisc,
American Art from the National Gallery of Art, the first made by an
American museum using digital technology, was released earlier
this year.

Most of these types of publications are aimed at schools and at the

general public. The National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London has a substantial collection of art videodiscs and
CD-ROMs but in the context of research and higher education, it
would appear this type of publication receives little use. Scholarly
electronic publications for art history are rare. The Brancusi Project
addresses fundamental issues of the design and marketing of
scholarly multimedia publications. Undertaken by an international
consortium of art museums, art historians and technical partners,
the project examines the life of one of the most significant sculptors
of the 20th century, Constantin Brancusi. The user will be able to
explore biographical, historical and bibliographical information by
using text, still images, film and video and sound, all interactively
linked. Phase 1 of the project, the creation of a "demonstrator" has
been completed. This will be evaluated and developed into a
prototype. The project is expected to culminate in 1995 with the
publication of a CD in two different versions, one for education,
distance learning and reference libraries and the other for purchase
by the general public.

Teaching Resources
The 35mm slide is the commonest form of photographic
reproduction used to support the teaching of art and architecture

© Jennifer Durran 1993 5

history. There is a great deal of interest within the higher education
sector in regard to the use of imaging to improve access to visual
materials.
At the Architecture Slide Library at the University of California at
Berkeley, efforts are under way to improve access to its 200,000
slides with the development of a prototype 'vopac' (visual online
public access catalogue) called SPIRO (Slide and Photograph Image
Retrieval Online). At the end of September 1993, 6,200 digital
images scanned from slides and their identifying records were
available. SPIRO is part of the campus-wide Image Database Project
begun in 1986 which ambitiously plans to provide access to objects
in the university's collections, (art and architecture slides, art works
in the university museum as well as other materials), via surrogate
digital images. A UNIX-based software called ImageQuery has been
designed at UCB for composing queries and for retrieval of images
and associated bibliographic information. It allows a user to
formulate a query by selecting options from pull-down menus in a
query construction window. When the search is completed, a list of
short records are displayed and the user can browse the
accompanying thumbnail images retrieved, up to 12 at a time. In a
further step, the user can request a full bibliographic record for a
particular image, a high resolution version of the image or both. One
interesting aspect of the system is that the user is provided with
image processing facilities so that, for example, images can be
rescaled and overlaid allowing comparisons to be made.

Public Libraries
Many of the libraries (including the Library of Congress), which in
the mid- to late-1980s pioneered the use of the analogue videodisc
to solve problems of preservation, management and access to their
pictorial collections, have since begun projects with digitised
images.
The Bibliothèque Publique d'Information (BPI), Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, created several analogue videodiscs in the late
1980s, one of which was devoted to art history. The library's aim
was to improve access to their encyclopaedic collection of images.
Despite the fact that the images are not high quality and the user
interface very primitive, from my observations, the system remains
immensely popular.

The new digital system, still at the developmental stage, will offer a
much more sophisticated approach. The BPI photographs art
exhibitions held in Paris, including those held in the Centre
Pompidou itself. Using this material, the BPI aims to recreate these
temporary exhibitions digitally. Each art work exhibited, views of the
gallery interior with the exhibition on display as well as
accompanying textual materials perhaps from the exhibition
catalogue will be available on the screen. Six thumbnail images can

© Jennifer Durran 1993 6

be viewed together to facilitate browsing, the user can then elect to
view the full image or details of the image. Remote access to the
collection will be available using ISDN and the first phase will give
access to the users of four French municipal libraries.

There are similarities between the BPI's activities and those of the
State Library of New South Wales' Multimedia Library Link Project.
Image transfer trials are planned between the two libraries.

Research and Development Projects

The acquisition, storage and dissemination of digital images for art
history are areas addressed, directly and indirectly, by a number of
exciting European R & D projects which are supported by the
Commission of the European Communities Directorate General XIII
(Telecommunications, Information Industries and Innovation). The
EC projects are characterised not only by very clever acronyms, but
more importantly, by the fact that they are undertaken by
multinational consortia of museums, libraries and technical
companies. Three such projects are RAMA, VAN EYCK and ELISE.

RAMA (Remote Access to Museum Archives) began in 1992 as a

three-year project to examine, amongst other things, remote access
by art professionals to museum archives including images. A
common interface to the databases at each of the seven museums
in the consortium will be developed and the application of high-
speed telecommunications including ISDN will be examined. Initial
testing of the first prototype will begin with sample documents and
images being sent between the Musée d'Orsay, Paris and the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, following the completion of a 2Mbit/s
Janet-Renater link expected August/September 1993.

Whereas RAMA is concerned with museums, VAN EYCK (Visual Arts

Network for Exchange of Cultural Knowledge) focuses on libraries,
specifically art photograph libraries. The project, which is still at the
feasibility study stage (January 1993 - March 1994), will investigate
remote access to major art history photograph collections, exchange
of images, improvements for art photograph collection management
and services, standards and structures for information in art
photograph libraries and image recognition. It will incorporate the
findings of RAMA into its telecommunications component and the
image recognition component will be developed out of the 'Morelli'
system designed by William Vaughan, which automatically classifies
and analyses the formal and visual aspects of pictures.

ELISE (Electronic Library Image Service for Europe) commenced in

February 1993 to identify the technical requirements of full-colour
image databases, to examine storage and retrieval options, to
explore needs of users, to design appropriate graphical user

© Jennifer Durran 1993 7

interfaces and to model international interconnection of systems
(Black, 1993: 293). So far, a test database of 500 images, captured
exclusively from 35mm slides of art works in the collection of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, has been set up. At the pilot stage, this
will be extended to 3,000 images incorporating material from the
collection of Tilburg University, The Netherlands. The ELISE system
will store images at three different levels: archive, working and
browsing. The browsing images (thumbnails), stored magnetically,
will be small (2Kbytes) to allow rapid distribution over a network.
The working images, (under 100Kbytes), will initially be stored
magnetically and later migrated to optical jukebox storage. The
archive images (20 Mbytes or more), created during the image
capture process, will be kept offline and stored uncompressed,
accessible only for special purposes.

4. Factors Impeding the Development of Image

Databases for Art History
A number of factors are impeding the development and
implementation of large-scale image databases specifically
designed to meet art historical needs.

Lack of information on image requirements

The development of information services in any field is generally
based on a foundation of knowledge about the potential users. Art
history, unlike other disciplines in the humanities, has not been the
subject of many studies concerned with the nature of its particular
information needs. The most comprehensive so far is that conducted
by the J. Paul Getty Trust's Art History Information Program (AHIP) in
conjunction with the Institute for Research in Information and
Scholarship (IRIS) (Bakewell, 1986). It concentrated on the research
patterns of 18 art history scholars.

But the scholar is only one of a number of users (I have categorised

them for convenience as the recreational art historian, e.g. museum
visitor; the amateur art historian, e.g. student, and the professional
art historian, e.g. researcher, curator, lecturer); and images, of
course, are only one of a number of information needs.

From existing studies, the discipline's basic image requirements are

clear:
• access to large numbers of surrogate images
• facilities to browse images, to visually select those of interest
and to rearrange their order to facilitate comparisons
• lower quality images are satisfactory for certain types of
activity; high quality images are essential for others.

These must be taken into consideration in the design of image

databases. Further work is needed to refine existing knowledge of

© Jennifer Durran 1993 8

image requirements and uses and the results of projects like ELISE
will contribute to a more sound understanding.

Lack of standards for intellectual access

Images are, by and large, still retrieved by their textual records.
There has been widespread recognition that the development of
standards for defining the structure and content of these records is
long overdue. The precision with which one can articulate in verbal
terms the physical appearance and 'content' of an art work will
affect the way in which its surrogate image can be retrieved,
especially in an electronic environment. The Getty AHIP has
supported many initiatives in this area such as the Art and
Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), published 1992, the Union List of
Artists Names (ULAN) and the Thesaurus of Geographical Names
(TGN), both due for publication 1993/94.

Most urgently needed are data standards, particularly those defining

data structure (i.e. the elements or categories of information which
compose a record), those defining data content (i.e. the way in
which information is represented in each of the categories) and
those defining data value (i.e. choice of terms that apply to each
category of information).

As well as data standards, information interchange standards are

also required to define technical specifications, formats, protocols,
etc for the exchange of information about art objects as well as their
surrogate image between systems. The Computer Interchange of
Museum Information (CIMI) project, supported by the Museum
Computer Network and EC projects like RAMA, VAN EYCK and ELISE
contribute to the development of these standards.
Professional bodies such as the Visual Resources Association's Data
Standards Committee and other organisations such as the Centre for
Image Information (De Montfort University) have been promoting
the use of standard descriptive practices to facilitate the
management, organisation and exchange of information.

Lack of standards for defining image quality

The issue of image quality is critical especially for the professional
art historian who has complex image needs. Images for browsing or
for reference purposes could be usefully viewed as low resolution
thumbnails; those used for image analysis need to be high-
resolution and full-screen. As yet there have been no standards for
defining these quality levels. The study conducted by the Getty Art
History Information Program showed that there is a definable point
past which viewers are no longer able to notice the difference in
quality in electronic images (Ester,1990: 53). Further work is being
conducted to extend these findings and correlate them with some

© Jennifer Durran 1993 9

physical measure of image quality (Jacobson and Axford, 1992).
These standards would be useful for system designers as well as for
those commercial services supplying digital images for downloading.
One American art slide supplier, eager to enter into the digital
image arena, has already been requesting advice from customers
regarding their requirements in terms of resolution and image size.

Storage requirements
Images captured at high resolutions create huge files of data to be
stored. The trend is to scan at highest possible resolution and, from
these archive images, derive working images that correspond to the
limits of current display hardware and network speeds. It is possible
to reduce the amount of storage required for images by using a
compression mechanism. The most widely used in art imaging is
that defined by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (Kodak, Sony,
Apple, Adobe, IBM et al). The JPEG compression algorithm typically
achieves compression ratios of between 10:1 and 20:1. By the end
of the decade, new algorithms will no doubt offer dramatic
improvements. It has been suggested that the current trends in
terms of increased storage capacity and processing power will
continue for at least another twenty years, and if costs continue to
fall, then digital storage of vast amounts of images will become
increasingly viable for many institutions.

Lack of connectivity
Image databases have generally been developed as stand-alone,
single site installations but the ability to send or receive images
from remote sites is becoming an important issue for those wishing
to offer their users a wider access to images. As networks become
faster and services like ISDN become widespread, full colour image
transmission will become increasingly feasible.
There are a number of American and European universities and
colleges either planning to use or actually using their campus local
area networks to provide better access to their image collections for
study and teaching purposes, for example, Duke University, North
Carolina; University of Maryland at College Park; Oppland College,
Norway. Success in providing online images to a lecture theatre has
yet to be demonstrated. Some of these services are also available to
Internet users. SPIRO at the University of California at Berkeley, for
example, is accessible by any remote terminal using the X- windows
protocol.

Not only is it possible to remotely search and view image collections

using an Internet browser such as Mosaic, but it is also now possible
to download images stored in archives at remote sites. The list of
FTP sites with art history images is growing, however many of these
projects are experimental and disappear as quickly as new ones

© Jennifer Durran 1993 10

appear. The University of Michigan's ArchiGopher offers small
archives of images of works by Kandinsky and Palladio as well as
Hellenic and Byzantine architecture. The Smithsonian Institution's
Photo1 will make available a variety of photographic materials from
its collection. The establishment of INTREPID (International
Repertorium of Images in Digital Form) has been announced by the
State University of New York College at Oneonta "in order to serve
the academic interests of the network community in a number of
key areas related to the visual arts, art history and history of
images" (Intrepid, 1993).

In the future, art history images will be available to the public from
sources other than libraries and museums. Several companies are
building collections of digital images of art works and acquiring their
electronic distribution rights. Some commercial image banks such as
The Image Bank are planning to offer a remote access service. The
Kodak Picture-Exchange, set to debut in the U.S. in 1993 and Europe
in 1994, will allow subscribers the opportunity to have a thumbnail
image catalogued and held in a central digital archive for inspection.
Users will be able to search online and place an order for an image,
either in photographic or electronic format.

Rapidly changing technology

The technologies of image processing, storage and dissemination
are in a rapid state of evolution which makes it difficult for collection
managers and administrators to make decisions regarding
appropriate hardware and software investments and the most
opportune time to adopt such technology. The lifetime of many
systems is now between 5 and 10 years. The Micro Gallery has been
given a lifespan of five years; the Musée d'Orsay's original public
information system has now been abandoned after five or so years
in favour of its new "Multimedia Atelier" concept. The limitations of
existing technology have not been permitted to be an obstacle by
the developers of such pioneering systems. As a result of their
innovative efforts, technology is gradually being shaped for art
historical needs.

For many applications, new digital formats are increasingly

displacing and rendering obsolete technologies like the analogue
videodisc. The main advantage of capturing material in digital form
is its flexibility. The information is independent of the limitations of
current storage formats and display devices, therefore it is less
susceptible to obsolescence.

The Kodak Photo-CD, which has been available since 1992, offers a
new, relatively inexpensive way to create and access image
databases. Kodak plans five different versions: Master, Pro, Portfolio,
Catalogue and Medical. The Photo CD-Master is the only format

© Jennifer Durran 1993 11

currently available. Each disc can store between 100 and 150
images, taken either from exposed, unprocessed film or from
existing 35mm slides. An integral part of the system is the 'image
pac', five levels of each image, ranging from 72Kbytes to 18Mbytes,
stored in one file. Each image pac is compressed to 4-5 Kbyte using
a Kodak proprietary compression scheme. A number of museums
and art libraries have experimented with the current version and
many that I spoke to were aware of its distinct limitations. Further
enhancements may open up additional applications. The Pro-CD,
planned for worldwide release later this year, will be able to accept
additional photographic formats such as 5 x 4" transparencies,
however the number of image pacs will drop to approximately 25. It
will be possible to make extremely high quality prints from these
discs. The Catalogue-CD will only contain thumbnail images,
approximately 4,500 in total which, as its name suggests, could be
useful for creating catalogues of images.

Ways to overcome the limitations of using two-dimensional formats

to represent three-dimensional art works or buildings has been the
subject of several projects using 3D computer graphics, elements of
CAD and precedents in the field of archaeological reconstruction.
Last year, the IBM Scientific Centre developed 3D reconstructions of
objects and sites for a temporary exhibition on Pompeii at London's
Accademia Italia. Another example is the prototype developed to
provide an electronic surrogate for studying the frescoes by Piero
della Francesca in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo. The user is
able to move through a simulated architectural interior and see the
relative perspective and scale of the paintings change according to
the user's viewing position (Lavin, 1992). It would not take too much
imagination to see databases of this type of material being
assembled in the future.

Copyright
The issue of copyright is seen as a major hurdle in the development
of digital image databases. Clarification of the legal and moral
obligations of the creators and users of these systems is vital. The
fact that digital images can be accessed from such an increasingly
large number of locations, downloaded, manipulated and used to
make high quality hard copy images means that the opportunities
for misappropriation of intellectual property are boundless. There is,
understandably, increasing resistance on the part of artists and
museums to give permission for their works to be used in digital
form. Efforts are under way to determine appropriate levels of
access to digital images, to effectively control their use and to
ensure adequate financial compensation for copyright holders.
Especially important are issues of control over copying images from
electronic format to paper, downloading images from one electronic

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format to another, and downloading images and distributing them
electronically.

As well as legal protection, some form of technology-based

protection may be necessary. One possibility is that proposed by
Kodak for use with their Pro-CD to prevent printing from high
resolution images. A form of encryption of the data and
"watermarking" of the protected image prevent its access without
the clearance code from the rights holder.

High costs and uncertain funding.

The costs of implementing an image database are high. The price of
some system elements such as hardware may be falling but labour
costs remain high. It is difficult to obtain a clear picture of the costs
and time involved. It has been estimated that whilst the process of
scanning images into the database would be time-consuming and
expensive, it would be modest when compared to other parts of the
undertaking which are more labour-intensive such as selecting,
preparing and tracking the source material (Ester,1990:53).

The Getty Art History Information Program has calculated that to

create an image database of 50,000 art objects would take 70,000
hours, 34 person years and cost $US 1.7 million (Besser,1991:589).
The Micro Gallery (London) cost approximately $US 1 million,
although the designers say it could be produced now for far less
than this. The National Gallery of Art's new videodisc cost about $US
200,000 to produce. Other sources suggest that the average price
for a prototype is around $US 50,000 and for a fully implemented
small system between $US 80,000 and $US 100,000.

The bottom line is that funding like this is rarely available at an

institutional level, especially in the current economic climate.
Financial support for some of the most recent successful projects
has come from philanthropic and commercial organisations e.g.
American Express sponsored the Micro Gallery, the Annenberg
Foundation supported the NGA's American Art videodisc. Many
European projects have state funding. The French government in
particular has long supported the introduction of innovative
information technology in cultural institutions.
The success of the EC funded consortium-based projects suggests
that co-productions between national and international partners,
where costs, risks and benefits are shared, may represent the way
forward for many undertakings in the 1990s. Inevitably, it is much
easier to obtain funding for a prototype than funding for the
implementation of a system, its ongoing development and
maintenance.

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 5. Conclusion
Despite current financial, technological and institutional obstacles,
the mid-1990s will undoubtedly see a proliferation of activity in the
development of digital image databases. The past has shown that
the development of art history as a discipline has been linked
inextricably to the developments in imaging technologies. The
ability to reproduce art works in digital form is sure to have as
dramatic an effect on the field as the introduction of the photograph
in the mid-19th century.

© Jennifer Durran 1993 14

 References

Bakewell,E, Beeman,W.O, Reese,C.M. & Schmitt,M (1988). Object

Image Inquiry: the Art Historian at work. Report on a collaborative
study by the Getty Art History Information Program and the Institute
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© Jennifer Durran 1993 15

 About this paper

This paper was presented in November 1993 at the Victorian

Association for Library Automation (VALA) 7th Biennial Conference
and Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia and was first published in
Drinking from a Firehose: Managing Networked Information,
Victorian Association for Library Automation (VALA) 7th Biennial
Conference, Melbourne. 1993. pp.89-99

An electronic version was made available in 1994 by Stanford

University on its Conservation OnLine website.
palimpsest.stanford.edu

A revised version was published in 1994 in the VRA Bulletin, vol 2,

no 4, Winter 2004. pp 15-24

This paper has been cited in the following publications:

Besser, Howard and Robert Yamashita. The Cost of Digital Image

Distribution: The Social and Economic Implications of the
production, distribution, and usage of image data: final report.
School of Information Management and Systems, Berkeley
University of California, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 1998.

Corsmeier, Thomas. “The Microreproduction and Digitization of

Maps: A Comparative Analysis.” WAML Information Bulletin, volume
30, no. 1, pages 10-34, November, 1998.
www.waml.org/corsmeier.html

Greenhalgh, Michael. “Art History.” in A Companion to Digital

Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/

Lasay, Fatima."The Spanish Colonial Santos of Baclayon Parish,

Bohol: A Digitization Initiative." 1999.
korakora.org/sulatin/lasay_bohol.pdf

About the author

Jennifer Durran. BA, DipEd, GradDipLib, MA (Lib)

At the time of publication the author was Visual Arts Librarian at

Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Email: jdurran@netspace.net.au

© Jennifer Durran 1993 16