FRICKbits

Review of FRICKbits, Reviewed October 2015 by Alexandra Provo, Kress Fellow in Art Librarianship Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University [email protected]

A New Home for Calabash

In the summer of 2020, Digital Scholarship Services at NYU Libraries was approached by NYU professor Jacqueline Bishop about finding a new home for Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters. Multilingual and focused on centering unheard voices, Calabash was a pioneering journal showcasing poetry, literature, and visual arts from across the Caribbean. The journal, which Dr. Bishop edited from 2000-2008, had since ceased publishing, and the NYU server that had been hosting the site was due to be retired. While it is not unusual to need to migrate content when systems become obsolete, this request required us to adapt existing workflows and develop some new ones. It also highlighted some of the limitations of our systems, especially when it comes to describing multilingual material. This poster outlines the workflows and activities undertaken to capture PDFs of each article, derive and enrich metadata using OpenRefine and Google Sheets, and upload material to NYU’s institutional repository. The migration work was multifaceted, iterative, and cross-departmental, involving colleagues from digital scholarship services, technical services, data services, and digital library departments. Along the way, we encountered some challenges, such as data that wouldn’t scrape, a need to reorder names, material in languages not represented in our system’s language code list, and decisions about which FDA import method to use. These challenges pushed us to learn more about web scraping, OpenRefine, and the DSpace import process. The scripted and semi-scripted methods we used got us part of the way there, but not quite all the way, so in 2021 and 2022 we had the help of two outstanding students from the NYU/LIU Palmer Dual Degree program, who enhanced the descriptive metadata to improve discoverability so that the journal's rich content can now reach a wider audience

Ebook User Expectations

This document synthesizes existing user research on ebooks, proposes user stories for the Enhanced Networked Monographs (ENM) reader interface, and poses questions for further investigation. Research confirms the desirability of full-text search, annotation, and navigation using internal links within an ebook. Downloading, printing, and copying/pasting are also important. Though navigation via internal links has been studied, expectations about the directionality of links could be further investigated. Relatedly, though users may expect ebooks to have Internet-style hyperlinks in them, conclusions are mixed regarding the appropriateness or value of links to external content, and it is unclear what sort of content users desire from external links. This issue, as well as expectations for navigating not just within a book but also between ebooks, are areas for future study.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundatio

Materia: Journal of Technical Art History

Review: Launched in the spring of 2021, Materia: Journal of Technical Art History is a biannual, born-digital, open-access, peer-reviewed journal for the technical study of art objects. Materia is situated at the convergence of conservation science, art history, and related fields, and is co-edited by an international group of conservators and art historians

Malangatana: Mozambique Modern

Malangatana: Mozambique Modern is the third installment of The Modern Series at the Art Institute of Chicago. The free digital publication builds and expands on the physical exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago which showcased the work of Malangatana Ngwenya focusing on the artist’s work from the late 1950s until 1975. Compelling and well-balanced, the visual design of the publication is effective as it embraces simple fonts and aesthetic choices focalizing Malangatana’s works

Acid Free

Acid Free is the free biannual publication of the Los Angeles Archivists Collective (LAAC). LAAC was founded in 2014, in the model of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York (ART) and the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW). The Collective “aims to bring the Los Angeles-area archives community together to discuss, collaborate, connect, and support each other.

Crafting Communities

Review: In the spring of 2020, when many felt untethered by the COVID-19 pandemic, Crafting Communities emerged to address this alienation by “enabling hands-on learning in a hands-off context” within the field of Victorian material culture, as the site notes. From a pilot program of two online events, the project has expanded to comprise further roundtables and online discussions, craft workshops and tutorials, an online exhibition, a podcast, and additional written resources. More than two years on, the site continues to provide a vibrant home for resources and discussions about Victorian material culture

French Paintings and Pastels, 1600-1945

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s French Paintings and Pastels, 1600-1945 is an online catalog that brings the museum’s collection of 110 French paintings and pastels to visitors and scholars worldwide. Launched in 2021, it is the seventh volume in a series of catalogs that systematically documents the NAMA’s encyclopedic collection and the first to be published digitally. It offers viewers much to learn from a digital distance and has infinite potential for addition and modification

Museum Crush

Produced by UK-based charity Culture24, this is a “whimsical and witty site . . . which showcases curiosities in collections up [and] down the land,” according to Culture24’s former board chair. Serving as a guide to current exhibits and lesser known collections in a wide variety of regional museums and London institutions, the website’s home page succinctly states its purpose: “The most beautiful, intriguing and powerful objects . . . live in museums. Let’s go find them.

Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts

Review: Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts, a library of 170 titles published by Bloomsbury Publishing, aims to provide students in the visual arts with practically minded resources for inspiration, technical advice, and career development. The digital resource library is organized according to major visual arts disciplines: fashion and textiles, design and illustration, photography, film and animation, architecture and interiors, and marketing and advertising