As the temperature outside begins to rise, so, too, are things heating up in the Art and Artifact Collections areas. Two days of training on the new database on May 4th and 5th were just the beginning. May was also filled with meetings with History of Art, Archaeology, and Anthropology faculty members both to introduce them to the new database and to seek their guidance on establishing priorities for our work on the database, so the collections can best serve their needs and those of their students. The database has so far been well received by faculty and students as they see how EmbARK is beginning to make the collections more accessible, even in these early stages.
Just over 20,000 records – not bad for a few months work!
In May we also prepared for the arrival of summer student workers, who will be busy with projects ranging from data entry to inventory and preventive conservation. History of Art graduate students Amy Haavik-MacKinnon and Tienfong Ho are creating complete catalogue records for objects in selected prints and drawings collections. Archaeology graduate student Joelle Collins is standardizing existing records for Greek and early Italian pottery. Undergraduate student Laura Kelly-Bowditch (History, 2010) and recent graduates Judith Barr (AB, ‘09, Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology) and Jenny Castle (AB, ’09, Philosophy and History of Art) are inventorying and photographing as much of the archaeology, anthropology, and fine arts collections as time will allow. The efforts of all these students are vital steps on the road toward building the database into an extensive virtual guide to the collections objects.
A sampling of images for objects currently in the database.