Digitizing initiatives not intended for profit

Digitizing Initiatives

Digitizing initiatives not intended for profit

It is widely acknowledged that the Internet has changed forever the way we work together, teach and learn, talk to each other, as well as find, use, create and share information. -- Paul Conway

Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO) seeks to ultimately have placed online -- where feasible -- all films, audio recordings and paper-printed texts relating to American representational art. A goal of TFAO is to place on its site all available paper-printed texts within its field of interest that are not otherwise freely available on other sites through the efforts of other nonprofit or commercial organizations. In its site's unique content pages, cross references and links are made to exhibition catalogues, articles, online videos, DVD and VHS videos, online audio, illustrated audio, and other compilations for further study.

Through its publication Resource Library, TFAO offers a complimentary digitizing and online publishing service to copyright holders of paper-printed texts. Resource Library's pages on scholarly texts from institutions and scholarly text from private sources describe its benefits to both the public and its sources of content. Resource Library does not charge authors to publish texts and offers the texts for online reading free of charge. The texts may be "in copyright" or with expired copyrights and may be "in print" or out-of-print. Resource Library secures permission from copyright holders prior to digitizing and publishing their texts online.

TFAO's special projects initiative and conversion of analog text to digital files and online publication of scholarly texts grant program describe other essay discovery, permissions and processing programs in addition to the ongoing services of Resource Library. Other current grant programs for museums include video and audio initiatives and transcription of podcast files to text and online publication. TFAO seeks to discover and share with institutions further avenues for digitizing information and services.

The Universal Library, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, is conducting a project named the Million Book Digital Library to digitize principally "in copyright," although out-of-print, books on many topics. The books are free to read on the Web. Persons who wish to have collections of books digitized and have the texts placed on the Web may contact Denise Troll Covey at troll@andrew.cmu.edu. A project proposal by Raj Reddy, University Professor, School of Computer Science, and Gloriana St. Clair, University Librarian, concerning The Million Book project states "NCES reports that 84 percent of libraries around the country are open between 60 and 80 hours a week. This digital library would be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year for a total of 168 hours a week, over twice the time most libraries are open. More than one individual will be able to use the same book at the same time. Thus, popular works will not be checked out and thus unavailable to others." Likewise, the texts available on the Web via TFAO-dl may be accessed by more than one reader at a time at all times during the year.

Project Gutenberg (PG) is an Internet producer of free electronic books (eBooks or eTexts). PG states that the "Project Gutenberg philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search." TFAO has canvassed hundreds of organizations and individuals to advise them of the PG service. TFAO encourages readers to consider PG as an option to have books digitized. Readers may send information on American art history books with expired copyrights directly to PG. Project Gutenberg announced in October, 2003 that it had reached its long-standing goal of releasing 10,000 free titles to the Internet, and that it would soon also release a DVD of most of these titles.

In February 2005, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art received an award of $3.6 million to dramatically increase the accessibility of its resources. The grant is used to fund a comprehensive, five-year program to digitize a substantial cross-section of the Archives' most important holdings, including the papers of a highly diverse range of artists and arts-related figures from the eighteenth century to today. At the end of the program, an estimated 1.6 million digital files will be available to the public. The papers of artists and other archival collections in the Archives of American Art are now available online. These collections, containing letters, postcards, sketches, exhibition records, diaries, and other unique documents, are a rich and valuable resource for the study of American art and history. Over one hundred collections are scheduled for digitization over the next five years.

Making of America is a digital library of texts concerning American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. MOA is a collaborative effort between Cornell University and the University of Michigan consisting of a collection of of out-of-copyright books and journals. Cornell University's MOA collection provides access to 907,750 pages (as of November, 2004) in 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles from 22 journals. As of September 1, 2004, the University of Michigan MOA collection contained 3,322,061 pages from 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles. Pages were first digitized as 600 dpi TIFF images, followed by optical character recognition of the TIFF images. Many pages have open access while others are restricted. Full text keyword search is available for both collections.

The University of Virginia Press established the Electronic Imprint in 2001 and its series of publications known as Rotunda. The electronic publications web site for the Press explains that "Rotunda was created for the publication of original digital scholarship along with newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social sciences. The collection combines the originality, intellectual rigor, and scholarly value of traditional peer-reviewed university press publishing with thoughtful technological innovation designed for scholars and students." Electronic Imprint says that digital scholarship "content can never be captured in its entirety by a printed book, no matter how long or heavily illustrated." A PDF file would not be digital scholarship because its content is exactly convertible to a printed book. On the other hand, digital scholarship would include texts with hyperlinks to quotation sources, audio and video files. As of October 2004 Electronic Imprint had not yet announced plans for publication of American art content.

Learner.org provides life long learning on the Web. Several digitized full motion online videos focus on American art in the A World of Art: Work in Progress series. A World of Art is a video instructional series on art appreciation for college and high school classrooms and adult learners. Each program in this art appreciation series is devoted to a contemporary artist who takes one or more works of art from start to finish. Broadband video is streamed via Windows Media Player. Each show is 30 minutes in length.

Examples are:

-- Lorna Simpson: Lorna Simpson, photographer, explores the ambiguous terrain connecting words and images in large-scale landscapes silkscreened on felt.

-- Hung Liu: Hung Liu, painter, comments on traditional Chinese society as she paints a series of works on the Last Emperor and his court.

-- Beverly Buchanan: Beverly Buchanan, photographer, sculptor, and painter, focuses on an important symbol of rural Southern culture: the shack.

-- Judy Baca: Judy Baca, painter and activist known for her mile-long mural in Los Angeles depicting Chicano history, works on two public art projects in Southern California.

An opportunity exists for PBS affiliates, museums and other non-profit owners of VHS/DVD programs to digitize them for online presentation. A list of videos for consideration are at TFAO's videos section within catalogues. Local public television stations have recording equipment to facilitate multimedia and can be approached by museums for assistance in digitizing museums' video programs.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently announced the launch of WPS1, a Web-based radio station devoted to the arts. WPS1 also serves as an audio digital library. MOMA received from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture a set of CD-Rs containing artists' lectures digitized from analog recordings of Skowhegan's artist faculty. The lectures were originally intended for use by the School's students and other artists. Through a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation the lectures were digitized and placed on DR-Rs, then disseminated to institutions including MOMA, where they are available to researchers. WPS1 is in the process of obtaining permissions from the artists to have selected archived lectures broadcast on the Web. WPS1 is also reviewing the technical quality of the recordings to determine if they are of sufficient quality for broadcasting.

Some art museums and related sources are providing free downloading or online reading of complete exhibition gallery guides, brochures and catalogues on their websites or sites of affiliates. Other museums are providing essays from the catalogues. Examples include:

-- Berkeley Art Museum of the University of California provides downloading of the brochure for Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky.

-- Text of the 88-page catalogue for Inventions: Recent Paintings by Caio Fonseca, an exhibition held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art is available on the artist's website.

-- Detroit Institute of Arts posted a catalogue titled "Artists Take on Detroit: Projects for the Tricentennial."

-- Hudson River Museum provides books for online reading via Google Books.

-- Jewish Museum provides for download of the gallery guide for From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig.

-- Louisiana State Museum provides the introduction and eight chapters of the book Medley of Cultures available for downloading..

-- Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon provides downloading of exhibition brochures.

-- Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum provides online viewing of exhibition brochures.

-- Museum of the History of Science, Oxford posted the catalogue "Cameras: The Technology of Photographic Imaging."

-- Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts posted a catalogue titled "Portrait/Homage/Embodiment."

-- Smart Museum of Art posted online a catalogue titled "Adaptation: Video Installations by Ben-Ner, Herrera, Sullivan, and Sussman & The Rufus Corporation"

-- Singapore Art Museum provides downloads of brochures for its Convergences of Art, Science and Technology (C.A.S.T ) series of exhibitions.

-- Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art provides downloads of numerous catalogs.

-- UCLA University Research Library presents Picturing Childhood, an online version of the catalog produced to accompany an exhibition held at UCLA

-- University of Wisconsin Digital Collections site provides online publication of catalogues for selected exhibitions held at the Chazen Museum of Art and its predecessors

Digitizing initiatives with revenue and profit aspects

For information on digitizing initiatives with revenue and profit aspects please click here.

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The eBook future

Related Non-Profit Organizations

Methods and Costs

Notes

Return to The TFAO Digital Library

A note on copyright and the public domain: Wikipedia has a page on the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which says:

"The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998 alternatively known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or pejoratively as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act extended copyright terms in the United States by 20 years. Before the Act (under the Copyright Act of 1976), copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years for a work of corporate authorship; the Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier.[1] The Act also affected copyright terms for copyrighted works published prior to January 1, 1978, also increasing their term of protection by 20 years, to a total of 95 years from publication.

"This law effectively 'froze' the advancement date of the public domain in the United States for works covered by the older fixed term copyright rules. Under this Act, additional works made in 1923 or afterwards that were still copyrighted in 1998 will not enter the public domain until 2019 or afterwards (depending on the date of the product) unless the owner of the copyright releases them into the public domain prior to that or if the copyright gets extended again. Unlike copyright extension legislation in the European Union, the Sonny Bono Act did not revive copyrights that had already expired. The Act did extend the terms of protection set for works that were already copyrighted, and is retroactive in that sense. However, works created before January 1, 1978 but not published or registered for copyright until recently are addressed in a special section (17 U.S.C. § 303) and may remain protected until 2047. The Act became Pub.L. 105-298 on October 27, 1998."

Individual pages in this study will be amended as TFAO adds content, corrects errors and reorganizes sections for improved readability. Refreshing or reloading pages enables readers to view the latest updates.

Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other Web sites and in employing referenced consultants or vendors. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. Traditional Fine Arta Organization, Inc neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although Traditional Fine Art Organization, Inc. includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over those other sites. For more information on evaluating web pages see Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc.'s General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History.