Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Project Pitfalls


My final project seems to be drawing to a close. Overall, it's gone very smoothly; everyone has been very helpful as I've moved through the process of digitizing slides. I made one mistake that would have given my final project a different shape, however. I don't think there's any need to discuss it in my presentation--it was entirely analog. When I first visited the slide library with the head of the Visual Resource Collection (VRC), we chose an artist and she helped me locate the drawer where the Max Beckmann slides live. I sorted through the drawer, then returned a second time to make my selections; I wrote these down and then compared my choices against our database to determine usefulness and need. I also copied a list of the VRC's catalog entries for Beckmann slides; there are 52 entries and I supposed that I had looked through about that many, although there seemed to be a few discrepancies. I returned a third time to collect the slides and bring them to the Fine Arts Library and at that point, I realized that I had been looking through only about half of the VRC's Beckmann holdings. I didn't get a chance to reevaluate my choices in time to get the ball rolling on the rest of the project. Once the slides are selected, cataloging happens and throwing a wrench in that gear is not a good idea. It's fairly time consuming and precise, understandably. Thus, my final set of slides--scans, really--is not ideal, although it still reflects a strong portion of the VRC's Beckmann collection. It has been absolutely interesting to go through the whole process, and it has enlightened me greatly about the images one finds through an internet search and why they all look wildly different (examples follow!).