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Contributors sought: YourPaintings Public Catalogue Foundation Project
The History of Art Department at the University of Glasgow is looking for art historians to volunteer to help create one of the most ambitious online art history resources in the UK.
The University has joined the Public Catalogue Foundation (www.thepcf.org.uk) and the BBC in YourPaintings, a pioneering national project to put online details and images of all 200,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK. YourPaintings will be an unprecedented contribution to public access to the ‘distributed national collection’ of oil paintings.
An essential part of the project is the tagging of each painting with reliable data to enable it to be searched for and found on the database by both the general public and researchers. In addition, it is the intention that each painting will be accompanied by a brief, accessible but authoritative description.
To achieve this task of data enhancement in time for the launch of the database in 2011 we are pioneering some innovative techniques to involve the general public as well as more specialist participants in the online tagging programme. The process will use algorithms to assess the statistical reliability of the crowd sourced data which have been developed by the Citizen Science Alliance’s Galaxy Zoo project based at the Astrophysics Department in Oxford, as well as other specialised methods.
We are now seeking to recruit art history colleagues to help with an essential aspect of this process - the online monitoring, supervision and arbitration activities necessary to ensure the quality of the final database. These tasks will take place from October 2010 for a period of 18 months and need not involve a commitment of more than a few hours a week. In return for their important contribution to this national project, they will be personally acknowledged on the project website hosted by the BBC. Contributors will also receive complimentary copies of Public Catalogue Foundation catalogues.
Briefly, the tasks are:
- Monitoring: ongoing assessment of random samples of database entries to monitor quality of data created by public tagging.
- Supervision: assessing random samples of specialist tags provided by contributing art historians and others, answering queries etc.
- Arbitration: making decisions on tags where the project’s statistical analyses and other processes give unclear or ambiguous results.
In addition, we are looking for enthusiastic art historians to serve on the Public Catalogue Foundation’s YourPaintings Advisory Panel, to provide specialist advice and support for the work of the project. In the first year the Panel might meet twice at most. There would be more regular email contact. Panel members would only be expected to offer help when they had spare time. All travel expenses would be paid. Advisory Panel members will be offered complete sets of the published PCF catalogues.
We will also be asking you later this year to promote the tagging activities to your colleagues, students and alumni.
Please download a response form, which will help to determine the level of interest in this task across the UK. For further information on the PCF, YourPaintings and the Data Enhancement Project please contact:
Andrew Greg, Dept of History of Art, University of Glasgow
0141 330 8519 / 0141 423 7081, a.greg@arthist.gla.ac.uk
Dr Jo Meacock, Dept of History of Art, University of Glasgow
0141 330 8520 / 0141 330 7306, j.meacock@whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk
Andrew Ellis, Director, Public Catalogue Foundation
020 7395 0331, andy.ellis@thepcf.org.uk