Author: veronique thome
Last saved by: INSTITUT NATIONAL D'HISTOIRE DE L'ART

Art Libraries Meet the Challenges of E‐publishing: New Formats, New Players, New Solutions- Paris,INHA,12.-14.08.2014

Outline of Presentation on the Rauschenberg Research Project

Sarah Roberts

Intro slide
I’m speaking today about SFMOMA’s Rauschenberg Research Project, the museum’s first collection catalogue produced solely in digital form. The Rauschenberg publication was completed under the auspices of the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, a consortium of nine museums brought together by the Getty Foundation to tackle the challenges of producing a scholarly art publication in digital format.  The Getty Foundation provided generous funding to SFMOMA and the other museums, and more importantly, they convened the whole group semi-annually, so that we could discuss ideas and shared problems with our colleagues at the other institutions.

Why Rauschenberg? slide
When the Getty Foundation approached us for the OSCI project, SFMOMA chose to focus our work on the postwar artist Robert Rauschenberg, for a few reasons:
•	He’s crucial to the story we tell: We always have works by RR on view, and we own more than 90 of his works, including 14 monumental pieces acquired from the artist’s own collection in 1998.
Included among them, his iconic Automobile Tire Print and Erased de Kooning Drawing
•	The unusual nature of much of the work (e.g. a scrolled record of a Model A Ford going through paint) made it a perfect test case for new forms of digital documentation.

So what does the project consist of? Basically additional layers of information grafted onto the collections area of the museum’s website… Those layers include what you see listed here:

Home page slide
Here is the home page, a kind of front door for the project. Many of the components you would recognize from its printed counterpart:

1)	Project Home page
a.	Orientation point, provides overview of project and all content available
b.	Parallel to the front matter of a traditional catalogue--Info about authors, acknowledgements, guide to entries
…and then when you scroll down…
You’ll find a visual index of all the artworks addressed by the project, as well as a clickable list of resources available for each:
c.	Essay
d.	Research materials
e.	Images of various kinds
. . .If you click on the artwork image or title, you will be taken to the Artwork Overview page. . .

Collection Artwork Overview slide

•	Layers of information added into our collections area of our website via a series of tabs and additional pages. (SHOW)
•	For us, embedding this catalogue content into the main collections area of our website was key to making sure that the publication was highly discoverable, and that it could be transferred relatively easily into the new site that we are building now.
•	But it also puts a lot of pressure on the main artwork page, which has to serve both general and scholarly users. It needs to balance light browsing and surfacing things of interest, as well as directed, focused pursuit of information Designed to facilitate any type of visitor’s efforts to skim or dive deep, depending on needs

1)	Artwork Overview page for Collection, 1954-55
a.	highlighted in sidebar: Original Essay, selected research materials, video content for both specialists and non-specialists
b.	new functionality on sfmoma.org: hi-res images with deep zoom capacity
c.	exhibition history, publication history, provenance—new for our website
i.	some linked directly to full text sources
d.	Enlarged view of the artwork as well as alternative and historical views
e.	A short overview text
f.	All of the materials for an individual artwork downloadable in a single click. . . Proven to exceptionally popular among our users

But much of the above could be done in a print catalogue, and we felt that in order to make a difference we had to capitalize on the two things:  first-- what we could offer research tools as an institution that no other museum could; second--exploit what the web is best at, delivering multimedia that can really deepen your understanding of the subject at hand.
•	For example, the dense layering of paint, fabric, and objects from daily life in Rauschenberg’s 1954 work Collection. . . Can be seen in super hi-res renderings of visual surfaces, revealing a Timmy comic strip dating to the 1950s. [Detail slide]
•	And for some works with moveable elements, or sound components, we can include video—for  an artwork like Trophy IV, for John Cage, it is simply impossible to understand the importance of sound in the piece when it sits still in a gallery or in a photo in a book—but if the artist demonstrates for you . . . .

Video slide

The heart of the catalogue are the newly commissioned essays by SFMOMA curators and Rauschenberg scholars

Essay slide
1)	Essay
a.	Quieter design to promote focused reading
b.	Tools for readers, researchers: Live footnotes and active citation tool, cite as info
c.	Embedded video
d.	Downloadable

Research Materials slide
2)	Research Materials page-- Provides access to research resources usually not made available in a traditional book; supporting documentation for info and arguments in essays, also new research additional info; more than could be in a book
a.	Views of this Artwork = Images of details, verso, early states, conservation treatments  And we can even reveal--through infra-red imagery--the original De Kooning drawing that Rauschenberg famously erased in 1953.  

Erased de Kooning slide
b.	Commentary + Interviews = previously published texts and interviews (some on video), fully searchable

Conservation slide
c.	Museum Files = unpublished resources from research files such as curatorial notes, conservation reports, correspondence with the artist, fully searchable

3)	Summary of content: If a print publication, it would total more than 600 pages, the largest research publication SFMOMA has ever devoted to a single artist

Slide: Challenges
4)	Challenges
a.	Research data management—as research lead, I had my own ways of taking notes, keeping track of primary sources, archival documents, and photos, but I had to adapt new methods of collecting and managing data knowing that some of those primary sources would be published
b.	Permanence, stability:  Mechanized permanence can’t be done unless you freeze it in amber, such as in archival PDF or equivalent. As soon as you do that you lose multimedia and you guarantee data variances between live data coming from collections database and static text
c.	Updates and new works added: not technologically different, but somewhat complicated to keep all pages dated
d.	Permanent URLs, DOI’s—all still developing rapidly, no widely accepted standard
i.	We chose to control our own URLs maintain ourselves so we can monitor and ensure permanence, tracking developments in automating
ii.	Findability and omnipresence = new kind of permanence
e.	Sustainability: The idea that you can do this once and leave it alone is a complete fallacy. It has to be a tended garden, at least in this stage of the evolution of the web. Maybe someday we can slice thru the web by time, but we aren’t there yet
i.	Very interested in web archiving initiatives that are coming out of library and archives groups such as NYARC; would love to work with such an initiative as a test case to archive as we update, add to the catalogue
f.	No revenue stream: Scholarship of this sort is best given away anyway; it’s what the field should be doing.

But the positive outcomes far outweigh the challenges

Slide Outcome #1
Through Google analytics and an extensive post-launch evaluation, we have learned that the RRP has truly global reach.
	25,000 unique visitors
700 museum, library, and university networks around the world
3000+ files downloaded

Slide Outcome #2
We will have more publications/projects to come, now that we have the infrastructure in place and understand the workflows. We have six major research projects underway that will make use of this capacity in one form or another to continue publishing deep research online.

Conclusion and thanks