Press Release, May 1, 2008
The
Society of Architectural Historians (SAH),
has received a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop the SAH Architecture Resources Archive (SAHARA, formerly SAH AVRN) a dynamic online library of architectural and landscape images for research and teaching. The grant, which follows a 2006 planning grant from the Mellon Foundation, marks a new era in which the Society will both collect and provide access to digital images to support research and pedagogy. Commenting on receipt of the grant, SAH President and Philip Johnson Curator of Architecture and Design at the
Museum of
Modern Art , Barry Bergdoll observed, “The fact that the Mellon Foundation has turned its attention to the issues surrounding digital resources in the field of architectural history is very important both for SAH and the discipline as a whole. I look forward to working closely with the SAH board as we research solutions that will be beneficial for SAH and the field of architectural history and its related disciplines.”
The need for planning in this area was articulated in a Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI 4) that was sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and held at the
University of
Virginia in
Charlottesville , July 30-August 1, 2006. As described by Richard Lucier, the Director of SCI, the focus the Scholarly Communication Institutes is to provide “an opportunity for leaders in scholarly disciplines, academic libraries, advanced technologies, and higher education administration to study, develop, and implement institutional and discipline-based strategies to advance scholarly communication in the context of the ongoing digital revolution.” The SCI that was held in 2006 focused specifically on the field of architectural history and the ‘grand challenges’ facing architectural historians as they seek to integrate new and emerging technologies into their research and teaching.
To develop content for SAHARA, SAH is collaborating with scholars and librarians from partner institutions, initially MIT,
Brown
University and the
University of
Virginia . It is the expectation that SAHARA will change the way Visual Resources and Art/Architecture Librarians at those institutions conduct their work. Instead of developing separate, independent collections of architectural images for each institution, librarians will contribute images and metadata to SAHARA, a shared resource that will be widely available. Initially images will be contributed to SAHARA by scholars at the same three institutions who have agreed to share thousands of their own images that were taken for research and pedagogical purposes.
To develop the technology for this online resource, SAH is working closely with ARTstor, the digital library of more than 725,000 images that serves the fields of art and architectural history, the humanities and social sciences. Building upon the existing ARTstor platform for storage, retrieval, viewing and presentation of images, ARTstor is going to develop two new tools to be used in conjunction with SAHARA. The first is a tool that will enable scholars, practitioners, librarians and others to contribute images to the shared resource of SAHARA. The second set of tools will be a content management system that will enable sophisticated processing and management of those images. These tools will be made available on an open source basis. The launch of SAHARA 1.0 will be April 1, 2009 at the SAH Annual Meeting in
Pasadena, California. Thereafter, enhancements to the SAHARA user interface and tools will be unveiled at the following two SAH Annual Meetings in Chicago (April 2010) and
New Orleans (April 2011).
The expectation for developing SAHARA is that scholars, librarians and institutional leadership will join together to create a shared online resource that will both enrich the field of architectural history and create a new collaborative work model for visual resources and art/architecture libraries. For the first time, instead of creating repetitive digital archives at each individual university, SAHARA will enable collaboration resulting in the creation of a highly authoritative resource with global coverage that will support new research and scholarly publications, and enhance university-level teaching. As SAHARA Project Director and Head of the Rotch Library at MIT, Ann Whiteside, commented, “The library, museum, and visual resources communities have a history around the building of digital collections and standards and laid the ground work that will support SAHARA as it develops. SAHARA offers the opportunity for the library and visual resources communities to work collaboratively with scholars to build a shared repository of visual content in an unprecedented manner. The issues around digital collection building in which many libraries are already involved, such as standards for describing digital content, and the ability to harvest metadata through standardized protocols, such as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), will all be put to the test throughout Phase 1 of SAHARA.”
Given the complexity of building this online resource, SAHARA will be developed in phases. SAHARA will be developed in the next three years as an online library of images that will include a vast range of digital media, from photographs and moving images to computer-generated drawings, QTVR panoramas, and 3-D models. The SAHARA digital library also will include content from disciplines that overlap the history of architecture, such as landscape history, vernacular architecture, urbanism, decorative arts, design history, construction, and engineering. At the end of three years, SAHARA will have developed into a continuously-expanding collection of thousands of architectural images and the ingest, content management, and search/display tools that are being customized for SAHARA will have gone through several iterations.
The
Society of Architectural Historians is developing SAHARA because it holds enormous promise for both research and teaching. Commenting on SAHARA, Dietrich Neumann, incoming SAH President and Professor of Architectural History and Urban Studies at Yale and
Brown
Universities, stated, “As a reliable database with authoritative
information as well as superb high resolution images, panoramas and film clips of important buildings and urban environments, SAHARA will substantially change and improve the way the history, present and future of the built environment is taught and understood. The availability of digital imagery, panorama photography and film, today presents a technological revolution for teaching that is as significant as the introduction of lantern slides was 100 years ago. For the first time in the history of our field, we can appropriately present architecture and urban spaces with their spatial complexities. Due to a very sophisticated approach to the creation of metadata, this fast expanding database will allow the researcher to ask quantitative questions, allow the creation of typologies, the tracing of the distribution of building types, and the transfer and metamorphosis of architectural and structural ideas over time and space. We expect fundamental methodological changes in our field.”
Photo Credit: San Xavier del Bac, .c 1781-1797
Pima County, Arizona View from south Photograph by Jeffrey Klee, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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