http://arthistory.berkeley.edu/visual_resource.html
Contact: Jan Eklund
The History of Art Visual Resource Collection (HAVRC) has put approximately 40,000 archival and 40,000 presentation images into the Media Vault along with faculty collections totaling about 10,000 images. Together the files total about 800 GB. They anticipate adding about 8,000 more images annually. Most of these images are digital still images, though VRC staff intends to add 3-D, audio, and video files in the future. Resources are used by UC faculty and students for teaching and learning every semester, as well as in publications.
Collaboration with the MVP has resulted in more efficient ways of backing up and archiving HAVRC content. Without the MVP, external hard drives connected to a single PC laptop would be used for image storage. DVDs would then be used for backing up content on the external hard drives.
Collection images from HAVRC in the Media Vault are also being made available for integration into the UC institutional collection hosted by ARTstor. This makes HAVRC images and metadata available for sharing with other UC campus as well as searchable alongside more than a million other images in the ARTstor collection. Having the images in the Media Vault streamlines HAVRC’s workflow by making it possible to provide updates and additions to the ARTstor collection as soon as they are available, using OAI harvesting, instead of having to wait and ship new images and metadata to ARTstor on a hard drive.
Partnership has also freed up an enormous amount of staff time that used to be spent on local backup and patron assistance. This staff time is now used more appropriately to catalog and prepare new images that may be harvested regularly and automatically for improved end-user access. Images are created and made available to faculty in a fraction of the time it used to take. Cataloging quality has improved because the overall demand for individual patron assistance finding and downloading images has decreased.
The MVP also serves a critical role in HAVRC’s departmental disaster preparedness plan because the digital collection will allow the department to resume its teaching mission after an earthquake, fire or other catastrophic event. Even if the entire analog slide collection is destroyed, HAVRC will still be able to use its digital collection, kept safe in the vault, to resume teaching.
