The Special Collections departments at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges are excited to announce the launch of the new Art and Artifact Collections Database, now available to the Tri-College community at http://triarte.brynmawr.edu.

Please note that this resource is currently only available to the Tri-College community either on-campus or via off-campus access through your library’s website.

Art and Artifact Collections Database Homepage

The database includes over 20,000 archaeology, anthropology, and fine art objects from Bryn Mawr’s collections and several hundred from Haverford’s collections. This multifaceted web site makes possible for the first time access to the colleges’ rich teaching collections for use in classes, for individual research, or for simple enjoyment. Students, faculty, and staff at the Tri-Colleges can now search the collections by artist, subject, culture, geographic region, time period, object type, and many other entry points. Or, users can browse highlighted parts of the collection to learn about the diverse holdings of art and artifacts from around the world.

Special Collections staff and students at both institutions have been working for the past eighteen months on data migration and cleanup, object cataloging, and imaging. To date, over half of the objects in the database have images and the majority have at minimum a basic level of cataloging. The original impetus to harmonize and expand the old, piecemeal databases came from the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art, which provided the funding for the initial stages. “Since training in material culture and curatorial practice is a key part of the Graduate Group’s work, it made sense to direct funds towards making the Art and Artifacts Collections more generally known and available,” says Catherine Conybeare, the Director of the Graduate Group. “This project has been managed with extraordinary speed and efficiency, and the whole Special Collections team deserves our hearty thanks.”

Screenshot of a selection of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Featured Collections from Bryn Mawr College

Cheryl Klimaszewski came on board as Collections Information Manager at Bryn Mawr in February of 2009 to oversee the transition of the old database records to a new collections management system and to develop the web interface. “It is so rewarding to see the results of everyone’s hard work come to fruition,” she says of the online version of the database. “So many students have been working on this—from cataloging to imaging—they should all be very proud. Plus, it’s a really terrific learning experience, since the skills students learn by cataloging and imaging our collections are transferrable to any museum, library, or archive anywhere.”

The biggest benefit of the database will be the increased awareness of these resources on all the Tri-College campuses. “The Art and Artifacts Database is a huge step forward for Bryn Mawr and Haverford. A great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes to make this possible. Now students and faculty can know more fully the tremendous resources that are available for them to study. We hope this will lead to greater use of our material objects on both campuses,” says John Anderies, Head of Special Collections at Haverford College. Eric Pumroy, Director of Library Collections and Seymour Adelman Head of Special Collections at Bryn Mawr, agrees: “Our extraordinary collections of art and artifacts have been hidden for far too long. This database finally makes it possible for students and faculty to explore the collections in a systematic way, and should lead to exciting new opportunities for teaching and research.”

The Advanced Search screen

For more information about the
Art and Artifact Collections database contact:

Cheryl Klimaszewski, Digital Collections Specialist
cklimaszew@brynmawr.edu
610-526-5093

To see the collections in person, contact:

Brian Wallace, Curator/Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts
bwallace@brynmawr.edu
610-526-5335

or

Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager
mweldon@brynmawr.edu
610-526-5022

We are happy to report that the server housing EmbARK Collections Manager has been configured and the software has been installed for key users. Collections staff have begun working with the new system on an experimental basis. After several discussions with our EmbARK user support representative, we have also outlined a plan for data migration. The initial phase of data migration should begin in about two weeks, which means that we will have some amount of “real” data in the system in time for our on-site training, which will take place May 4 and 5 on the BMC campus. The training will be attended by staff members from Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges, along with graduate and undergraduate student employees and interns working with the collections.

Over the next month or so, we will also be meeting with faculty members by department in order to set priorities for developing the database. Faculty assistance will be essential in helping us to identify those collections and objects for which faculty would like to see complete and accurate records (including images) in the database. Though we have been and will continue to “clean up” data in preparation for its move to the new system, this task has so far focused on removing redundant information and generally standardizing existing records on the most general level. Breaking down the collection into smaller, more manageable “chunks” will allow us to create and review object records in detail with the assistance of faculty, staff, and knowledgeable graduate students. As these groups of records are reviewed and finalized, we can begin to turn our attention to our ultimate goal of making this database available to the greater BMC community and, in the long term, to the general public. To this end, faculty assistance is essential in identifying the key objects and parts of the collection upon which to focus our efforts so the collections database can become an accurate and useful research tool for the Tri-College community.