Digital collections are one of the most helpful research resources an institution can provide. Coming from the perspective of an art historical researcher, I typically arrive at a museum or cultural institution’s site knowing what I want to see. Not every museum site visitor is conducting research, though, and it is important for institutions’ digital collection searches to accommodate both audiences. Fabian Offert and Peter Bell, Dominik Bonisch, Tim Sherratt, and Mitchell Whitelaw write about new and past digital collections and interfaces that explore the potential of digital resources to effectively organize digital collection to be more user-friendly.
Sheratt offers examples of how people can creatively use publicly available digital records in his article, “It’s all about the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People.” Written in 2011, Sherratt demonstrates the potential to push digital collections beyond only making them available online. One of his examples is the project “The Real Face of White Australia,” which he uses to explain how digital databases have the ability to turn records from tools of oppression to a restoration of humanity. In the case of “The Real Face of White Australia,” Sherratt and Kate Bagnall used photographs that government officials in the 19th and 20th centuries required non-white Australians—which included Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants in addition to indigenous Australians—to submit so that they could re-enter the country if they traveled abroad. Because the National Archives of Australia digitized these records and made them public, Sheratt and Bagnall could use these photographs to create a searchable database and craft biographies for these people to offer a counter-history to the myth of a “White Australia.” This project demonstrated how digital records could be used analytically and to restore marginalized perspectives in history.
Transitioning from Sherratt’s accounts of early forays into digital collection organization, Bonisch and Offert and Bell report on experiments with generative models to improve the intuitiveness of digital collections through pattern recognition. Bonisch explains an experiment using the massive, digitized collection of the Danish National Statens Museum for Kunst to create a model trained to “think like a curator.” Working in a bottom-up pattern, the artificial intelligence treats each separate piece as its own data point and gradually narrows it down based on similar visual features and metadata. Offert and Bell discuss the use of imgs.ai, an artificial tool also aimed at increasing the browse and searchability of several collections. Although it cannot search across collections, imgs.ai works with a few museums including the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan, and the Getty. This model begins by presenting the viewer with a random series of all the museum’s digitized images. The user can click on an individual image to see more images with similar features. In this way, the model keeps “a human in the loop” in its searches. From Sherratt’s early examples of using digital collections to create interactive, analytical databases, Bonisch, Offert, and Bell take the technology forward another step with generative technology creating and recognizing patterns between images.
Exploring digital collections is essential for any student of art history. In my experience, the digital collections of the Metropolitan, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Rijksmuseum are particularly user-friendly for researchers—especially those that have a very clear idea of what they are looking for. While conducting research for my undergraduate thesis about a wardrobe with German decorative influences, I needed to search the collections of a few Swiss and German museums. From a book detailing the Historisches Museum Basel’s collection, I found the accession number of a wardrobe that I believed would be particularly helpful to include in my work. The collection site proved to be very accurate for finding that particular wardrobe. When I used the keyword “wardrobe” to search for more examples, the results were limited. The case was even more drastic in the collection search for the Bayerisches National Museum. This digital collection could only recognize German words (Fig. 1 and 2).
Fig. 1: Search results from the Bayerisches National Museum digital collection search using the keyword “wardrobe”
Fig. 2: Search results from the Bayerisches National Museum digital collection search using the keyword “schrank“
This small experiment between primarily German collections may only prove my own lingual Anglo-centricity, but it does introduce another challenge to organizing and improving the accessibility of digital collections. Is there a way for metadata attached to images to be easily translated? In a world where digital and online spaces can feasibly grant access to collections from any corner of the globe, will language still be a barrier? Or will tools that primarily use visual features, like imgs.ai, mitigate this problem?
Digital collections are important for institutions not only for research but to grant accessibility to all. This not only includes academics, but also the casual browser. While collections databases should be able to execute advance search functions, institutions should also provide intuitive and engaging interfaces to browse through. Whitelaw discusses this idea in his article “Generous Interfaces for Digital Collections.” Whitelaw praises the intuitive nature of the Rijksmuseum website and offers a few examples of user-friendly interfaces in Australia including “Discover the Queenslander,” a magazine archive, and “Manly Images,” a series of digitized images in the collection of the Manly Public Library. I think that the Rijksmuseum is also a great example of an institution that balances accurate, thorough, and intuitive search functions with engaging content for the casual browser. Its “Art Explorer” tab is particularly exceptional because it provides prompts to encourage leisurely audiences to interact with its collections. In the future, I think that institutions should look to the Rijksmuseum’s website as an example for both leisurely browsing and detailed searches.
After this week, I firmly believe that digitized collections should be accessible to academics and general audiences alike. Bonisch and Offert and Bell’s articles highlighted the potential to make digital collections even more user-friendly while Sherratt’s article the great work that digital collections management has already accomplished. Whitelaw emphasized the necessity of “generous” interfaces to de-mystify searches and encourage browsing for general interest. Moving forward, it will be exciting to see—and even participate in—the new methods that institutions will discover to make their collections even more engaging and accessible to the world.
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