A Modest Proposal – The Digitisation Programme of the National Art Library

Martin Flynn

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

20 October 2016

2

The Victoria and Albert Museum – V&A

Current Exhibitions

3

Undressed

Opus Anglicanum

Revolutions

Engineering

Future Exhibitions

Pink Floyd

Ocean Liners

Balenciaga 4

5

The National Art Library

yy9y08y8y98y98y98y

6

National Art Library – Some Highlights

Illuminated medieval manuscripts

Artists books

Private libraries – Forster and Dyce

Literary material

Probably the largest collection of sales catalogues

Over half of collection in languages other than English

Exhibition catalogues

Extracts from Bleak House manuscript, Charles Dickens, with author’s alternative titles (Solitary House, Ruined House etc)

7

Jonathan Swift’s Corrections Gulliver’s Travels

8

9

Themes

Funding Streams

Institutional Culture

Technological Developments

Equipment Costs

Specific Digitisation Initiatives

Funding Streams

Google and Microsoft

The People’s Network

European Funds

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)

British Library – HE focus

V&A Priorities and Culture

10

V&A Culture

FuturePlan Developments

Priority is object collections

Digital content is a challenging concept in our collections and object based environment

Museum databases cannot cope adequately with books

Differing metadata standards

V&A and E-Publishing

11

Exhibition Road FuturePlan Project

Current Work Model Plan

12

Museum E-Publishing - ISSUU

13

V&A Publishing

Latest Catalogue Reprints as EBooks

14

Search the Collections Options

15

Search the Collections Result

16

17

The Route to Digitisation – Costs and Technological Developments

200th anniversary of Dickens’s Birth – Tale of Two Cities, Mystery of Edwin Drood and David Copperfield published online in 2012

18

Degenerate Art – Entartete Kunst Typescript Published Online 2014

19

Wassily Kandinsky - Destroyed

20

ECCO (18th Century Collections Online)

21

Empire Online – Adam Matthew (Sage)

22

World Fairs – Adam Matthew (Sage)

23

24

Current Technology – Image Access

Bookeye 4

Bookeye 3

25

Internet Archive – South Kensington Art Handbooks

Metadata and Download Options

26

OCR and Search Inside the Book

27

28

Workflow Software - Goobi

Discoverability

29

The Future

Scale up the programme

Use of volunteers

Further commercial partnerships

New library management system

Crowdsourcing transcription of Bleak House

Cultural change to make digitisation a core activity

Perfection the Enemy of Progress

Internet Archive V&A Group

Getty Research Portal

30