Visit us at NCECA

Project co-founder Ted Vogel will have a booth at the NCECA conference in Tampa, FL, March 30-April 2. If you have questions or suggestions about accessCeramics...or just want to loiter with Ted, come visit the booth!

accessCeramics crew presenting at LC News & Brews @ Lucky Lab, Multnomah Village!

Maren Kloppmann, Vase with Drawing (2007). Thrown & Altered, Cone 8, Electric Oxidation, Underglaze Pencil, Porcelain.

Well, accessCeramics started out as a small joint collaboration between the Lewis Clark Art Department and Watzek Library and has now gone global in scale, with 235 artists representing 14 countries! More impressive is the use we've see from around the world, with every country checking in within the last month except for a handful (see below). In fact, we had 5,160 visitors from 70 countries from Oct. 4 through today.

Tomorrow night, along with Deborah Heath of the Sociology/Anthropology Department, and Liz Stanhope of Mathematics, the Lewis & Clark accessCeramics crew will present a lightning talk updating the faculty and research community at the Lucky Lab in Multnomah Village. Talks begin at 4 pm, snacks available by 3:45 p.m., November 5th.

# of visits to accessCeramics within the last month: Light green = less visits, dark green = heavy visits; white = none

new artist review process, or how to sustain a project with no staff

Since the beginning of the accessCeramics project, we've struggled to find an efficient way for artists to submit work for review, and for our curatorial board to vote on these submissions. Past procedures have included Google Groups and lots of email, though this proved to swallow vast amounts of our submissions coordinator's time. And with grant funding for our submissions coordinator coming to a close, we needed to develop some quick and efficient alternatives.

So, beginning today, new artists who want to contribute their images to the collection have a new set of procedures. Prospective contributors must obtain a free Flickr account first, and then complete a form on our site. Once the form is submitted, board members automatically receive an email directing them to vote on our new locally developed software. When all members vote (or two weeks have passed, whichever comes first), the software generates a 'verdict' email to the artist, with further instructions if appropriate.

In a perfect world, we would have limitless funding to sustain the project with hired staff. But in the absence of funding, we have little choice but to try to automate procedures as much as possible. Our curatorial board has used the new software for voting over the last week or so, and we've already experienced gains in efficiency. Assuming prospective artists can adapt to the new submissions procedures, the project's chances of long-term sustainability in the absence of grant funding have just received a significant boost.

VRA 2010

Stephanie Beene presented on two panels at the Visual Resources Association Annual Conference in Atlanta, from March 16-21, 2010. The PowerPoint slides are posted on Slideshare.

Vra2010 accessCeramics.org - a digital image database

View more presentations from Visual Resources Association.

accessCeramcis at NCECA

Ted Vogel will have a booth to promote accessCeramics at the annual NCECA conference in Philadelphia, March 31st-April 3rd. If you plan to attend the conference, please stop by...Ted would love to answer any questions you have about the site, or just talk ceramics.

EDUCAUSE

Jeremy and I are presenting at EDUCAUSE tomorrow at 8:10 am. Here is our presentation as it stands:

Twitter: good for lots of news

Since our redesign, coming up on a year ago, the news portion of our home page has been this blog. And while we've had some wonderful things to report, we haven't exactly had a great number of things to say. This was especially true over the past summer. We reported the NEA grant award on April 30th, and then nothing else until the word of Margo's retirement in late September. Because of our blog drought, one might think that not much has happened with accessCeramics over the summer. Of course, that's not entirely accurate: our collection grew by about 33%, or nearly 600 images.

Whenever an artist contributes images to accessCeramics, it's news-worthy. But perhaps based upon our limited time and resources, it wasn't necessarily blog-worthy. But thanks to Twitter and its API, that has changed. Now when Miranda accepts submitted images into the collection, a Twitter post is generated for each contributing artist to our Twitter feed via a PHP script and the Twitter API, and is logged in our MySQL database. And now that our home page news is based upon our Twitter feed instead of this blog, we can effectively promote new images on accessCeramics without any additional work.

We'll still maintain this blog for announcements that extend beyond Twitter's 140 character limit, and will reference any relevant blog posts on our Twitter feed. But with this new model of news, we can hopefully do a better job at promoting the artists and their new works on accessCeramics without extending our already limited resources.

And in case anyone wants to follow our Twitter feed directly, it's http://twitter.com/accessceramics