Tag Archives: National Gallery

News from the National Gallery – 3

Alongside the 200 online catalogue entries in 200 Paintings for 200 Years, and the bibliographies and exhibition histories I wrote about recently, the National Gallery has now put on its website a provenance for every painting in the main collection. This post talks in brief about why provenances are important, and what makes them difficult to deal with, before outlining what we’ve done at the Gallery.

A note of caution: the image above is misleading. We haven’t published provenances as structured data, let alone visualisations. It’s taken from an old screengrab of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Elysa provenance-parsing tool, and I used it because it provides a visual representation of a provenance.

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News from the National Gallery – 2

At the same time as announcing 200 Paintings for 200 Years, the National Gallery has expanded the online information it provides about its paintings to include bibliographies, exhibition histories, and provenances. This post is about the first two; I’ll write more about provenances soon. Like the 200 online catalogue entries, these are projects that my team has been working on for some time – building on work done at the Gallery years ago.

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News from the National Gallery – 1

Earlier today, the National Gallery launched 200 Paintings for 200 Years – 200 catalogue entries placed online, most for the first time. All in all, this comes to about 2.2 million words; 2,850 images; and references to 8,130 publications, 1,325 archival documents, and 860 exhibitions. As this is something that my team and I have been working on for quite some time, I thought I’d say a bit more about the project.

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What is EODEM?

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet over the last year: I haven’t really been able to face social media since the pandemic started. But when I have tweeted, it’s usually been about conferences – and I’ve been making much of something called EODEM. This post is to explain what EODEM is, and why I think it’s important.

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Collections Trust 2020: systems, interoperability and aggregators

Conferences have not been the same this year: I’ve particularly missed the opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues, and the random conversations and encounters in queues that compensate for the quality of the coffee one is waiting for. We have been left with the formal proceedings, and I wanted to say something about the papers presented at the (comparatively) recent Collections Trust conference, held online over two half-days on 1 and 2 October 2020.

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Dublin: kiosks, linked data, and the Dead Zoo

This April I was in Dublin for a few days, speaking at Collective Imagination 2019, the conference for users of TMS museum collection management software. This is a brief post about the conference and my lecture, and a visit to the Dublin Museum of Natural History.

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Too much information: a CIDOC blog post

I’ve been keeping quiet about what I’ve been doing since starting work as Collection Information Manager at the National Gallery in February last year: much has been routine, and I was still planning the more ambitious part of my work, the Gallery’s Collection Information Project. But the project is now underway, with a project manager and data wrangler both now at work.

However, rather than post something here, I’ve taken the opportunity of an invitation to write a piece for the blog that has just been set up by CIDOC, the international organisation for museum documentation, to describe the problems that we face at the Gallery, and how the Collection Information Project plans to solve them. You can read it here.

One month, five events

July was a busy month – so busy, that I’ve only now finished writing up notes from the five different conferences, workshops and meetings that I attended in just over three weeks. But why spend so much time out of the office? Continue reading One month, five events