NEH-funded Art of Life project held first face to face meeting in St Louis

L to R front row:  William Ulate, MOBOT; Charlie Moad, IMA; Ed Bachta, IMA; Trish Rose-Sandler, MOBOT. L to R back row:  Doug Holland, MOBOT; Gaurav Vaidya, CU-Boulder; Rob Guralnick, CU-Boulder. Not pictured Mike Lichtenberg, MOBOT; Chris Freeland, WUSTL.

On October 4th & 5th 2012, team members from the Art of Life project held a meeting at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.  While team members had been collaborating virtually since the beginning of the project in May of 2012, this was the first time all team members had met in-person.  Institutions represented were from Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT), Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder); and Washington University, St Louis (WUSTL).

The goals of the meeting were to review:

1) overall workflows

2) feedback on the schema draft that was publicly posted August 2012

3) development of the algorithm used to find illustrations on BHL pages

4) next steps for the project

The team tackled thorny issues such as copyright of images, crowdsourcing image metadata, synchronicity of data, dealing with multiple illustrations on a page, and large bulk uploads to Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.

The project’s documentation and meeting notes are all available on the team’s wiki page http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life   

Questions about the project’s goals, progress, and technology can be directed to Trish Rose-Sandler trish.rose-sandler@mobot.org  The Art of Life project runs from May 1, 2012 through April 30, 2014 and is generously funded by the:

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog post do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.