Transcending Boundaries: Cross-Disciplinary Images in the LibraryAuthor(s): David AustinSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 23,No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 14-17Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949282 .

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Transcending Boundaries: Cross-Disciplinary Images in

the Library_ by David Austin, University of Illinois at Chicago

[This article is based on a poster session prepared for (but not presented at) the ARLIS/NA Annual Conference in Baltimore, March 2003.]

When the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago accepted the gift of the Comer Archive of

Chicago in the Year 2000, it agreed to make the images of the city captured during 2000 available to the public. The diverse content of the subject matter of the archive invited further contributions from other areas within the university Since the library tran scends boundaries in collecting and delivering more traditional

information, it was logical for the library to place itself at the cen ter of an institutional effort to help create and provide digital images and other information for a variety of disciplines, both on and off the campus.

Like so many university libraries, the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago is very proficient at delivering digital information to its patrons. Until recently it exhibited little or no interest in creating digital information and was content to license the products of commercial presses and

aggregators. The major beneficiaries of such products were usu

ally the faculty and students of medicine and the sciences. Humanities received a few crumbs of electronic journals, and the arts enjoyed the images of the Art Museum Image Consortium

(AMICO) and what few items the faculty placed on their own class Web pages. This gift of photographs and associated materi als related to a project to capture the life of Chicago during the

year 2000 changed the path previously trod by the library. Chicago in the Year 2000, or CITY2000, is a visual and aural

time capsule of Chicago and its residents created during the mil lennium year. A staff of more than 200 photographers, video and audio artists produced 500,000 photographic negatives and

approximately 500 audio and videotapes. The staff, including some of the photographers who wanted more control over their

work, printed over 1,200 images and exhibited them in more than fifteen locations throughout Chicago, including the

Chicago Historical Society, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Daniel Terra Museum of American Art, as well as a few loca tions in Europe and the Middle East. Moreover, CITY2000 staff

digitized and placed nearly 10,000 images on a Web site using Merlin software.

In January 2001, the Richard J. Daley Library began negoti ations with Gary Comer, founder and former CEO of Lands'

End, and offered to host the archives of the project. The library director, the late Sharon Hogan, wrote a letter to Mr. Comer in which she presented the library's case to become the new home

of the archive. In it she described the library, its special interest in collecting materials related to Chicago, its record of public access (both physical and electronic), and the library staff's

ability to create attractive and functional Web-based resources available to the general public. A trip to the library, during which he visited the Special Collections Department, convinced Mr. Comer that the materials from Chicago in the Year 2000

belonged there. The University of Illinois at Chicago is the city's largest insti

tution of higher education, and it accepts the responsibility and

opportunity to contribute to the well being of urban life.

Figure 1. Nancy Turano Dances Carmen by Tony Perez.

14 Art Documentation ? Volume 23, Number 1 ? 2004

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Figure 2. 333 W. Wacker Building by Patrick Linehan.

Through the Great Cities Commitment it implements hundreds of teaching, research and service programs. The UIC Library "strives to meet the information needs of UIC students, faculty, and staff. The library contributes to teaching, research, outreach, and clinical service ?t UIC by acquiring, organizing, and archiv

ing information and by providing expert staff, access to information sources in all formats, and instruction in the retrieval and use of information/'1 The Special Collections

Department of the Richard J. Daley Library participates in this effort by collecting archival materials related to cultural, civic, and business organizations associated with Chicago. As a visual and aural time capsule, CITY2000 captures an entire year in the life of a great city and fits admirably in the collecting efforts of the library.

The contract between the library and Mr. Comer's CITY2000 Foundation stipulated several important points that made the deed of gift unique. The photographers would retain the rights

Figure 3. Robin J. Hahn by Haley Murphy.

to their negatives and have access to them whenever they wished, but the right to reproduce photographs from the nega tives would expire upon the death of the photographer. The

university library agreed to make all materials accessible at least until the year 3000. In particular, the library committed to con

structing and mamtaining a sustainable Web site that would be

publicly available until the year 3000. The ease of making images accessible to the public through

the Web seemed appealing, but the library wanted to present them with the most attractive and functional digital asset management software. A working group composed of Francis Kayiwa from the

library's Systems Team, Kavita Mundle from the Cataloging Department, and the author met from October through November 2001 to evaluate digital asset management products, including the

Merlin system on the existing NT server. The group found William Lund's article, "Digital Object Library Products,"2 to be

particularly helpful during the evaluation phase. We examined

scalability, functionality, platform requirements, and image qual ity on Web sites operating with one of the twenty-three products reviewed in Mr. Lund's article. We e-mailed or telephoned com

panies that looked promising to seek further information and, when possible, to request a demonstration and a client list. We also contacted Merlin and JobMinder , since both products target commercial markets primarily and were not included in the RLG DigiNews list.

Figure 4. Handcuffs by Lloyd DeGrane.

Our analysis of the digital asset management products cur

rently on the market led us to choose Luna Imaging?'s Insight .3 The strengths we found in Luna's product included security, scala

bility, and image quality; it also met the institution's platform requirements. Moreover, Insight offered cross-collection search

ing capabilities that did not require additional XML cross-walking scripts. The client list included institutions of higher education and

museums committed to presenting high quality images. Insight 's ability to display thumbnails and four different sizes of

JPEG images, in addition to a MrSid? wavelet compression, makes this digital asset management system especially appealing to users interested in a detailed study of photography. The Apex version of Insight also allows for unlimited collections which may be

spread out over various servers on and off campus. We selected

Volume 23, Number 1 ? 2004 ? Art Documentation 15

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Figure 5. Cambodian New Year by Zbigniew Bzdak.

Oracle as the database to drive the system because it is a robust

manager and is capable of accepting the lengthy entries necessary to present full captions or descriptions. Mr. Comer and some of the

photographers who worked on the project attended a reception and expressed enthusiasm about the selection of the Insight product to place the digital images, audio and video on the Web.

The value of the Comer Archive of Chicago in the Year 2000

may be measured in several other ways. As a cultural and socio

logical document, CITY2000 exposes the life of a great city, neglecting neither the very rich attending elegant formal fund raisers nor the homeless sleeping on heating grates to absorb

warmth.4 Every parade held in Chicago during the year 2000,

including the wet and snowy Martin Luther King Day march, the

city's two colorful and boisterous St. Patrick's Day parades, Chicago's unique Southside Bud Billiken parade, and the Christmas Parade, is documented.

The following list includes a sampling of the projects relat ed to the diverse disciplines represented in the educational curriculum of the university, along with selected images from the projects:

Figure 6. Voting at a Car Dealership by Heather Mahaney.

Performing Arts: Dance Companies in Chicago by Antonio Perez (Fig.l) and Robert Davis's Lyric Opera Opening Architecture: Chicago's Architecture by Decades by Patrick Linehan (Fig.2), Alex Fradkin's Chicago Architecture, and

Vaughn Wascovich's Chicago's Vernacular Architecture Arts: Artist in Space by Haley Murphy (Fig.3) and

Displaced Artists by Kattrina Wittkamp Criminal Justice: Cook County Jail by Lloyd DeGrane

(Fig.4), Carlos Ortiz's Crime Victims, and Bill Manley's Chi Town Skinheads

Religious Studies: Religion in the Year 2000, in which

Zbigniew Bzdak documented the multicultural, multira cial city during Ramadan, Purim, Buddha's Birthday, Christmas, Easter, and the Cambodian New Year (Fig.5), to name but a few Political Studies: Every staff photographer and all major freelancers documented voting in the precincts during the contested presidential election of the year (Fig. 6) as well as Tony Perez's Protest Against Violence Throughout the City Athletics: Windy City Boxing Club by Robert Davis and Wes Pope's Inner City Little League (Fig.7) Medical Science: Lasik Surgery by Robert Davis, Kidney Transplant by Yvette Dostatni (Fig.8), and Cancer by Kathy Richland Social Welfare: Chicago Cares by Zbigniew Bzdak and Day Laborers by Jon Lowenstein (Fig.9) Education: Preschool Classrooms in Chicago by Jennifer Keats

(Fig.10), Prom Night at the Hyatt Regency Hotel by Leah

Missbach, and Bronzeville Military Academy by John Booz

Figure 7. Base Hit by Wes Pope.

The images of CITY2000 represent many additional areas of

study at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but the ones cited above should give the reader an ample idea of its coverage.

The library's additional two image collections will come from the Field Museum of Natural History The museum does not have

enough server space to contain all of the images it anticipates making available both to the public and internally to staff, but it desires control over the documentation as well as the security rights. Money from an IMLS grant funded the scanning of images both from the original ledger book for the Columbia World's Fair

(1893) and from a scrapbook assembled by a family that had visit ed the fair nearly every day it was in existence. The funding also

16 Art Documentation ? Volume 23, Number 1 ? 2004

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Figure 8. Kidney Transplant by Yvette Dostatni.

covered the licensing of a digital asset management system. In

exchange for the right to have the images available for students and faculty at the university, the library will rent server space to the museum at a very reasonable cost for long-term storage of the

images. The two collections should be available early in 2004. Staff members of the Richard J. Daley Library are now shar

ing their expertise with the Art History Department to help them mount two collections with the Insight software. Jane Darcovic, slide librarian for the College of Arts and Architecture, will be responsible for a collection of more than 600 images of

primarily Chicago architecture obtained from slides taken by William Brubaker, principal in the firm of Perkins and Will. The

college owns the rights to distribute the images to the public. Deborah Fausch, assistant professor of Art and Architecture

History, will work with members of the library staff to mount

4,000 images of modern and contemporary architecture for which she has received permission from the publishers to dis tribute to the UIC students and faculty for educational purposes. Student employees of the college will scan the images while

library staff members will lend their expertise in building appro priate databases and metadata structures to insure accurate and

full access to the images. Together the two groups will mount the two collections during the winter 2004 term.

Figure 10. Preschool Classroom by Jennifer Keats.

In the coming months the departments of history and lan

guages within the College of Liberal Arts will also be contacted and offered the services of staff and Insight software to create

digital collections for instruction and research. These projects are

only the beginning for the library as it continues its role as the

campus unit that transcends boundaries to provide information for the entire university.

[Photographs accompanying this article are provided courtesy of the Comer Archive of Chicago in the Year 2000, Special Collections, Richard /. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. All pho tographs copyright by the photographers.]

Notes 1. UIC Library Mission Statement, adopted by the faculty

September 14, 2000. 2. RLG Dig?News, 5, 5, http: / / www.rlg.org / preserv / dig

inews / diginews5-5html (accessed 15 October 2001). 3. http: / / lunaimaging.com/ 4. The Web version of CITY2000 is located at:

http: / / www.uic.edu / depts / lib / resources / city2000 / instruc tions.shtml. The more fully functional version is available as an

Insight client version and needs password permission.

.x -A

Figure 9. Looking for Work by Jon Lowenstein.

Volume 23, Number 1 e 2004 e Art Documentation 17

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