images.frick.org

     The Frick Photoarchive (take the tour here) is comprised of over one million photographic reproductions of western art. They are on their way to digitizing their whole collection through grant funded projects.
     The homepage from the Frick Digital Image Archive is very accessible to guests. There is a main keyword search that auto searches all entry fields. I think that this search function is superior rather than searching exclusively. You can also browse the collection. Only some of the collections have finding aids attached to the collection description, I am unsure of why this is.
     One thing I really liked about the Frick's photoarchive is that they have a blog. I think that it is important to document new findings and progress that happens within their institution to show that they are moving forward and committed to improving their information and access.

     The Frick's photoarchive is unique because of their commitment to documenting the history of art through capturing conservation measures taken and documenting multiple versions of a single work. Not all of these captures are available digitally though.

 
     The collections I explored the most was the endangered library negatives in private collections. The display of the collection is customizable to the viewer which is handy. Two of the views are simplistic and image based. The "long view" is most user friendly because the images are not just labled by file names, but almost the whole file record is displayed next to the image. It is not obvious how to navigate to the next pages of the collection and I was unsure of how to do this at first.



Collection description:

     This collection description is thoughtful and informative. It includes the details about the content in the collection, the history and geographic locations of the works photographed, and the Frick's future plans for making this content more available to users.

Image record:

 

     I think that the image records in this collection are very concise. More information is made available to users by the library and is accessible by a link in the image file record in FRESCO. (research and documentation info)This information is much more complete and detailed than the image file record and includes useful information about the provenance, Library of Congress subject headings, etc... I think that if these two records were combined it would make accessing this information easier; just taking out that one step and having all the information together would be better.     

     The digital images are available for download (jpegs) on the website and also on ArtStor!

     One discrepancy I noticed between multiple image records was that there was a "school" field and/or a "genre" field displayed. I think that this could be useful for searching if there were a way to search exclusively, but in this case there is not. I think that they should eliminate the school field and keep genre. As for the material field, the meta is referencing the material of the original object photographed, and not the type of film used etc. I think that this is fine to do because it is not the photographs and negatives that are being studied, rather the works of art.