Preservation and Engagement of the Archive: Frick Art Reference Library Digital Art History Initiatives

For this panel, two members of the Frick Art Reference Library's Digital Art History Lab will explore recent initiatives that seek to preserve and enhance both analogue and born digital materials by creating new knowledge resources using the latest emerging technologies. The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), consisting of the research libraries and archives of the Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art, was formed in 2006 to facilitate collaboration that results in enhanced resources to research communities. NYARC has developed an innovative web archiving program in order to address the urgent need to document ephemeral and dynamic web-based versions of art resources historically collected at each research institution in an analog format. NYARC is actively building, preserving, and facilitating online public access to curated collections and providing scholars a rich amount of data to engage with. PHAROS, the International Consortium of Photo Archives, was formed to respond to the accelerating need to make fully accessible to a new generation of scholars the unique materials found in scholarly researched photo archives around the world. The Consortium is currently engaged in a pilot project to support the creation of a digital research platform using the ResearchSpace software that will contain nearly 1.5 million images with accompanying scholarly documentation from five PHAROS member institutions. The platform will make use of emerging technologies such as AI and automated image searching to create an essential resource for those engaged with new research methodologies within the framework of digital humanities.