accessCeramics

Visit us at NCECA

2011-03-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-11-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-11-05T21:03:00.001-08:00

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

2009-09-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

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

accessCeramics co-founder Margo Ballantyne retiring

2009-09-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Margo Ballantyne, one of the original founders of accessCeramics, will retire next week from her position as Visual Resources Curator at Lewis & Clark College. Margo has been at Lewis & Clark for 19 years, and has admirably brought the College's visual collections into the digital age. She has been an active leader in the VRA community at a local and national level.
Margo has contributed a great deal of enthusiasm, energy, and fun to the accessCeramics project. While she still may be involved at some level, her influence, great humor, and ability to keep some of our crazy ideas in check will be greatly missed.
Stephanie Beene, a recent graduate of the University ot Texas-Austin's School of Information, will take Margo's place as the Visual Resources Curator at Lewis & Clark. She will also serve on the accessCeramics curatorial board, and will almost certainly bring fresh ideas to the project.

accessCeramics receives NEA grant

2009-04-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

We're pleased to announce that accessCeramics has been awarded a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts - Access to Artistic Excellence grant in the Visual Arts category. The $10,000 award will support the continued expansion of accessCeramics as well as the introduction of master artists' works into the collection over the 2009/10 academic year.

According to the Arts Endowment website, the Access to Artistic Excellence grant program "encourages and supports artistic creativity, preserves our diverse cultural heritage, and makes the arts more widely available in communities throughout the country." In other words, a great fit for accessCeramics and specifically our goal to make images of high quality contemporary ceramic art widely available to the arts education community.

Thanks to the Arts Endowment and a hearty kudos to the accessCeramics team!

accessCeramics at the Northwest History and Heritage Extravaganza 2009

2009-04-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

On April 18th, the accessCeramics project was introduced to community leaders, staff and volunteers from historical societies, museums, schools, historic preservation commissions, humanities groups, professional historians, and archaeologists, who attended the NW History and Heritage Extravaganza conference in Portland, Oregon. Margo Ballantyne, a member of the accessCeramics team, participated on a panel about providing access to digital images that are housed in visual resource collections, libraries, and archives, or other venues that make use of modern electronic tools and practices.

Session Title:
DAM if you do. DAM if you don’t: Digital Asset Management &
Delivering Access to Image Collections

Session Chair: Tiah Edmunson-Morton, Oregon State University.
Margo Ballantyne, Lewis & Clark College
Julia Simic, University of Oregon
Karin Whalen, Reed College

accessCeramics at NCECA

2009-04-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

Look for accessCeramics at the upcoming NCECA 2009 Conference "Ceramic Interface: From Dawn to Digital" April 8-11, 2009 in Phoenix, AZ.

We'll have a table at Booth T35 with a representative who can answer your questions about using the collection. We'd also love to work with artists interested in submitting to the collection.

For more information contact: Miranda Costa (missmcosta@gmail.com).

accessCeramics in Toronto!

2009-03-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

Margo Ballantyne presented on the accessCeramics project at the Visual Resources Association annual conference in Toronto today. The presentation was part of a panel entitled "Outside the Canon" about "recent and ongoing projects that often push the boundaries of traditional content areas in visual resources."

Outside the Canon

Co-moderators:

Laurel Bliss, San Diego State University
Melissa Lamont, San Diego State University

Speakers:

Rodney G. Obien, Worcester Polytechnic Institute - George C. Gordon Library
Bill Kirby, Director, Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art
Birgit Plietzsch, University of St Andrews
Margo Ballantyne, Lewis & Clark College

accessCeramics at College Art Association

2009-02-27T12:36:00.000-08:00

Margo Ballantyne and I presented on accessCeramics at the College Art Association Annual Conference in Los Angeles yesterday to a crowd of about 75 people.

We told the story of the accessCeramics collection, explaining how the idea evolved from a conversation across a slide light table to a successful project. It was part of a panel presentation called "You can do it, we can help: building digital image collections together."

All of our co-presenters focused on collaboratively-sourced digital collections, and besides ours, all incorporated ARTstor.

We received many inquiries about the project following the presentation.

accessCeramics at College Art Association Conference

2009-02-25T06:27:00.000-08:00

Members of the accessCeramics team were invited to the College Art Association's annual conference to participate in a session called You Can Do It, We Can Help: Building Digital-Image Collections Together. Margo Ballantyne and Mark Dahl will talk about our experiences creating accessCeramics with a little time, some freely available tools, a little grant money, and lots of help and cooperation from artists. Given the current economic climate, it's likely our low-cost approach to creating an image collection will generate some interest.

The session will take place at 12:30 on Thursday, February 26th, 2009.

AccessCeramics welcomes New Curatorial Members

2009-02-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

AccessCeramics.org welcomes new members to the curatorial board. Richard Burkett, Thomas Orr and Namita Wiggers will join accessCeramics co-founders, Visual Resource Curator, Margo Ballantyne and Assistant Professor of Ceramics Ted Vogel in selecting new artists for the website.
Richard Burkett is Professor of Ceramics at San Diego State University and has exhibited, lectured and presented workshops internationally. He has been an early developer of online ceramic education tools and developed the “Ceramics Web”, co-developed the list-serve “ClayArt”, is the author of the “Hyper Glaze” a noted glaze and clay calculation software and is co-author of the 6th edition of “Ceramics: A Potter’s Handbook” one of the most popular ceramics text books. In addition, Richard has served on the board of the National Council on Education for the Ceramics Arts (NCECA) as 2003 San Diego Conference Liaison and most recently as the Director of Communications.
Thomas Orr is Professor of Art and Head of Ceramics at the Oregon College of Art Craft. He received his MFA in Ceramics from Claremont Graduate School in California. Thomas has taught at several universities and lectured and exhibited his work internationally. Most recently he presented a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in Portland, Oregon and was a resident artist at the International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemet, Hungary. Thomas has served on the Board of Directors for the Contemporary Crafts Gallery and Museum and the LH Project, a ceramic residency program in Joseph, Oregon and was co-liaison for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) 2006 Portland, Oregon Conference.
Namita Gupta Wiggers, is the Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in Portland, Oregon. She received an MA in Art History from the University of Chicago, has conducted research for E-lab, a product design firm and has produced a line of sterling jewelry sold through galleries. Namita has published on museum education and art in journals such as “The Journal of Museum Education”, and she was instrumental in the creation of the 2008 catalog “Unpacking the Collection”, the first publication to focus on the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Since coming to the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, Namita has curated numerous ceramic exhibitions, such as the “Patty Warashina: Real Politique and Drunken Power Series” and Antonio Prieto: A Family Collection” exhibited during the 2006 Portland NCECA conference. Recently, she curated the “Generations: Ken Shores”, “The Ceramics of Gertrud and Otto Natzler”, “Toshiko Takaezu: Recent Gifts” exhibitions and hosted “ Eden Revisited: The Ceramic Work of Kurt Weiser” curated by Peter Held.
The curatorial board is responsible for selecting images for acessCeramics.org and will provide direction to improve the ongoing development of the web site. If you are interested in submitting images or know clay-based artists that you feel should be included, please send five or more (e-mail sized) images and a current resume and/or a portfolio link to Margo Ballantyne (margo@lclark.edu).
For questions concerning the curatorial process of accessCeramics.org, please feel free to contact Ted Vogel, Assistant Professor of Art, Program Head of Ceramics at vogel@lclark.edu or by calling 503-201-0400.

New Site Design Launch Today!

2009-02-12T20:19:00.000-08:00

One of the major goals we hoped to achieve with the help of our NITLE grant was to improve the accessCeramics.org site design. Today we can cross that off the list, as we unveil our new si te.

In addition to the clean new look, this site has a few additional features:

a search box in the upper-right corner

new browse lists, with the ability to view 'tag clouds' of field values

a new "thumbnail/large image" view (here's an example)

selected blog posts linked from this home page

We owe a big thanks to Zoe Anderson and Mike Lindsey for their help with the redesign, and to NITLE for the means to do this. And, of course, the site is nothing without the wonderful art images. Thanks artists!

Today is a big milestone, as we've reached 1000 images!

2009-02-02T13:45:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all of you for your help and contributions. We truly appreciate your patience, and the time you’ve spent helping us build the collection.

Our new website design will be up and working by February 13. Check it out!

Thank you!

Flickr API improvements could yield more collections like accessCeramics

2009-01-27T09:26:00.000-08:00

Last month Aaron Straup from Flickr announced four new API methods for machine tags (and also happened to mention our project!). One of these methods in particular, flickr.machinetags.getValues, inches Flickr closer to the idea of 'Flickr as database' for metadata storage.

In the past, if you wanted to find all the unique values of a given field (artist, for example), you had to query Flickr to get all the photos with 'artist' as a field, then make a call for each photo to get tag values...and then use a language like PHP to extract unique values. Once your collection gets past a few images, this sequence of events quickly becomes impractical.

With flickr.machinetags.getValues, you can get all unique values for a given field with just one call. This paves the way for creating UI links for browsing different values for fields. It also lessens the need to store metadata in a MySQL database, like we currently do.

As others have expressed interest in creating collections like accessCeramics, we've begun development on a more generic tool for cataloging Flickr images. We're also working on a companion presentation tool for viewing these catalogued collections. Thanks to the new API methods, the presentation software should run quickly, and shouldn't rely (much) on an external database. We'll post more information about this project as it becomes available.

Public launch of accessCeramics.org

2008-12-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

Though online since March, 2008, the public launch of the accessCeramics project will occur in late winter and early spring of 2009. Scheduled for presentation at three national/international conferences and one regional northwest conference, members of the accessCeramics team will present papers, host a booth, and generally spread the word about the contemporary ceramics database. Check below for the names of the various conferences, their locations, dates and websites. Session dates and times will be posted later. Thanks to all of you who have submitted images to raise the numbers of the continually growing collection. For those invited artists who still have this on your "to-do" list, we encourage you to submit your images (or more images) for maximum exposure during the public launch of the website.

CAA (College Art Association)
Los Angeles, CA., February 25 – 28th, 2009

VRA (Visual Resources Association)
Toronto, Canada, March 18th – 22nd 2009

NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts)
Phoenix, AZ., April 8 – 11th, 2009

Northwest History and Heritage Extravaganza: Oregon Heritage Commission, The Washington State Historical Society, The Oregon Historical Society, Northwest Archivists.
Portland, Oregon, April 15-18, 2009.

-Margo

Winner of Survey Drawing

2008-12-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

The accessCeramics team recently surveyed a group of accessCeramics users to help improve the accessCeramics collection and web site. Those taking the survey were eligible to win a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate.

I'm pleased to announce that Steve Hilton is the winner of the gift certificate.

We'll have more about our survey results on this blog in the near future.

-Mark

geographic diversity

2008-10-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

Part of the beauty of using Flickr as our submission system for accessCeramics is its global reach. This allows us to seek contributions from artists who live just about anywhere. To reflect this, we just added a Google Map of our artist locations to accessCeramics.
As we're still building the collection, the geographic diversity of our artists is currently limited to the United States (Michael Moore is our lone international artists). As the collection grows, hopefully our national and international representation will grow as well.

accessCeramics supported by NITLE Grant

2008-08-20T16:09:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer, accessCeramics was fortunate enough to be awarded a $19,000 grant from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE)'s Instructional Innovation Fund--Western Region. The grant will facilitate the growth of accessCeramics and its use in liberal arts colleges in the 2008-09 academic year.

Funds will support our new part-time Submission's Coordinator, Miranda Costa, who is now helping to recruit artists for the collection. She is also providing technical support and assistance to artists as they add their images.

Funds will also go to support redesign of the accessCeramics website and improvements to the interface to make it more useful for teaching. Furthermore, grant monies will support travel to the NCECA 2009 conference, where we will be promoting accessCeramics to arts educators and artists.

As part of the NITLE grant, several ceramic arts instructors at liberal arts colleges around the country will be using accessCeramics in instruction this coming academic year. These colleges include:

Juniata College
Carleton College
Macalester College
Denison University
Kalamazoo College
University of Puget Sound
Hope College
Willamette University
Lawrence University

Instructors will provide feedback to us about the accessCeramics user interface and collection.

The accessCeramics team is grateful for NITLE's support.

code4lib journal article

2008-06-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

Issue 3 of the code4lib online journal was published today, and it contains an article I wrote on the technology surrounding accessCeramics. Some of the main points have already been discussed in this blog, though the article goes into somewhat more depth. If you're interested in some of the design philosophy behind accessCeramics, and perhaps some of the nerdier aspects of the project, it might be worth a look.

accessCeramics now PicLens compatible

2008-06-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

accessCeramics is now compatible with the browser plugin PicLens. What does this mean? It will completely change way the images on the site are viewed.

PicLens creates a 'virtual gallery' view, which is a wall of images one can easily navigate. It also lets users view full screen slide shows of images. accessCeramics has browse-specific PicLens slide shows for any case. For example, to view all 'Coil-built' images, go to the browse screen, and click 'Start Slideshow'.

accessCeramics also supports PicLens Lite, so those without the Piclens plugin will get a similar Flash-based view.

Flickr Machine Tags Revisited

2008-04-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend we added the ability to browse by different fields in accessCeramics. While this isn't really that hard of a problem, technologically speaking, it became clear that flickr machine tags couldn't handle this very well.

It came down to this. To get a list of the different values the images had for glaze, for example, we would have to do the following:

Make an API call to get a list of images in the collection

For each image, make an API call to get the list of tags & machine tags

Cycle through each set of tags and perform a regular expression match to find the 'glaze' machine tag, and store that value in a PHP array

Put the array in order, and print the results.

Or, if the metadata was in a local database like MySQL, we would have to:

Make an SQL query to the database, and process & print the results

In addition, the API doesn't support partial or truncated machine tag searches. For example, if I wanted to search for 'sculpture', I wouldn't get 'figurative sculpture' as part of my results set. This would require our users to be overly precise with their searches, which just isn't ideal design.

Because of situations like this, we decided to migrate the metadata to a MySQL database. We'll still include machine tag generation in Flickr as part of the process, in the event that API methods are added in the future. But storing all metadata in a local DB will greatly enhance the site's functionality and speed, especially as it grows to the volume we hope it will.

When this project began, we were hoping Flickr would be the database layer. To a certain extent it still is, but it just doesn't offer the same flexibility as a fairly simple MySQL database. It's still a cool idea, and hopefully Flickr will make some enhancements in the way machine tags are used and queried. With some of the recent chatter about an academic Flickr, hopefully the conversation that will move Flickr in that direction has begun.

NITLE Summit

2008-04-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

I gave a poster session on accessCeramics at the NITLE Summit in San Francisco last week and had lots of interest from folks in the liberal arts community. Since we didn't have internet access in the poster room, I put together a few screen shots to show off a few different views of the system.

One of the things I wanted to demonstrate was the ability to view the collection inside and outside of Flickr. I also wanted to show off the machine tags concept. People were pretty impressed that you could do a controlled vocabulary inside of Flickr. I also threw in a few shots of PicLens to demonstrate the flexibility of the Flickr platform.

Why the numerous cataloging fields?

2008-04-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

I've had several inquiries as to why we have such specific cataloging(metadata) fields for the ceramic images. It does take a little extra time and thought to add information to those fields, but the reason is a good one. Once we get the search field operational, we are hoping that this more detailed cataloging will shorten the amount of time that an instructor will have to search a site and will also return a more specific set of hits. If a professor wants to show some really good and varied examples of objects that are coil built, he/she does not have to search the entire site for said examples. Or a professor might want to show what ceramic artists are doing with installations. Typing one of the cataloging choices available in any of the metadata fields into the search field will produce the desired results. Watch for this "search" feature and others as we continue to develop the accessCeramics site.

Flickr machine tags

2008-03-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

Much of the Web 2.0 world is flooded with tags to describe all sorts of objects. While tags are great, they are limited in that they are just keywords. In library catalogs and databases, we're used to searching by different fields (title, author, etc.). Tags aren't really equipped to fit this model, unless the search field is always 'keyword'.

Enter Flickr machine tags, which Flickr unveiled in January of 2007. A machine tag has the following syntax:

namespace:field="value"
(example: ceramics:artist="Ted Vogel")

Not only does this allow 'field/value' relationships, but it also lets projects (like ours) group relationships together by using a namespace. In a nutshell, developers can use Flickr machine tags to create interfaces which allow users to search or browse by metadata fields.

When an artist catalogs an image for accessCeramics, machine tags are automatically generated for the image on Flickr, based upon the field values he/she enters. The creation of all these machine tags for each image lays the groundwork for the development of interfaces to search and browse by field.

As of this post, we're still developing our full searching/browsing user interfaces, though we have some elements in place. For example, a user looking at Lisa Conway's Peachy might notice that she used the Electric Oxidation glazing technique. A simple click on Electric Oxidation will reveal other pieces in the collection that used the same glazing technique.

We're hoping that the interfaces we create around images described by machine tags will help to elevate the use of Flickr within the academic and library communities.

accessCeramics mentioned at VRA conference in San Diego

2008-03-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the Visual Resources Association conference in San Diego. I had the opportunity to mention our database accessCeramics in two conference sessions. Librarians and visual resources professionals are becoming more interested in how people partner their image projects with Flickr. I had requests for the accessCeramics URL (accessceramics.org) so people could pass it on to their instructors and requests for how Lewis and Clark College put the project together.

We're live!

2008-03-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

We're now live at accessceramics.org!

-Mark

Showcasing accessCeramics

2008-03-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

I'll be showcasing the accessCeramics Flickr site while at the Visual Resources Association Conference in San Diego, March 11th - 16th, 2008. When I return, I'll discuss the feedback I receive from conference attendees. It should also give good exposure to the artists already in the collection.

Welcome to accessCeramics

2008-03-06T21:04:00.001-08:00

I'm Jeremy McWilliams, a team member of the Lewis & Clark College-based accessCeramics project. Our goal is to develop a contemporary ceramics image collection for educational use. The project is somewhat unique in that we're developing the collection using the image sharing site Flickr. It's a bit risky, since Flickr hasn't really gained mass acceptance within the academic community, though we think it will work. Flickr offers a great API for the development of the site, already has an infrastructure for distributed contribution to groups, handles copyright quite nicely with creative commons licenses, and is free for users.

This blog will discuss various aspects of the project and model during its development. Each of the current Lewis & Clark College team members (myself, Margo Ballantyne, Mark Dahl, and Ted Vogel) will offer different perspectives on the project. Mark and I are systems/technology librarians, Margo is the Visual Resources Curator, and Ted is the Assistant Professor/Program Head in Ceramics (that's his work above).

For now the site is here, at http://library.lclark.edu/flickr.