Digital Projects & Programs

Complementing and expanding the DAC's longstanding programs of education, exhibition, and publication, work using digital technologies is under way. Strategically interwoven, these projects and programs include the adoption of a new collections management system into which the DAC has migrated such information, and which now supports public search on the web; the new DAC Open Access Images policy, put into effect on 12 December 2012; the DAC Digital Imaging Initiative, which will transition in 2013 to rapid-capture photography of collection objects; and an upcoming redesign of the DAC website, also planned for 2013. These projects converge in strategic ways. Along with direct study of original objects, they expand the means by which the DAC collection supports its educational mission.

The DAC moved its behind-the-scenes collections management to a new system by means of a major data migration in 2009-2011. Selected information from that system is now searchable on the web. DAC Collection Search online enables students, faculty, researchers, and the public to discover more easily what the collection holds. Launched as early as possible in its development, that search resource finished private testing in summer 2012, went public that August in a bare-bones early iteration, and is now undergoing frequent incremental improvements. In early 2013, an initial group of images will be added to its current descriptive text.

Other images produced by earlier phases of the DAC Digital Imaging Initiative have been used to create small-scale "learning objects" for pedagogical use. Zoomable images of Japanese woodcuts from the collection are featured in a more extensive learning object developed collaboratively at Wesleyan to help students, collectors, and researchers better understand Ukiyo-e Techniques.

Wesleyan's New Media Lab also has created a digital presentation of Max Klinger's Brahmsphantasie !!! in conjunction with the Davison Art Center (the presentation requires Flash, and it will open in a new window or tab in your web browser).

As a trace of earlier work along related lines, a navigable image of this Dürer engraving (frequently used for teaching from the collection) was presented as proof-of-concept to enable close study of the individual marks that make up the work (developed at the DAC in 2001, this older resource may not work in all current web browsers).