Re: Scholar's web sites

From: Robert A. Baron (rabaron@PIPELINE.COM)
Date: Tue Aug 08 2000 - 20:51:53 CDT

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    Message-Id: <200008090143.SAB05758@dns.ccit.arizona.edu>
Date:         Tue, 8 Aug 2000 21:51:53 -0400
From: "Robert A. Baron" <mailto:rabaron@PIPELINE.COM>
Subject:      Re: Scholar's web sites
To: mailto:IMAGELIB@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU

    <pre> At 03:29 PM 8/7/00 -0700, Charles Rhyne wrote:

    >This message is addressed especially to college and university faculty,
    >but I hope will be of interest to other IMAGELIB readers also.
    >
    >Most of the web is a black hole. This has persuaded many professionals to
    >keep it at arms length, using it for temporary messages on list-serves and
    >to access source material posted by research institutes, and major
    >universities, but shunning the web as an avenue for their own professional
    >publication. Most of us recognize the advantage of the web in making
    >material available quickly and to a large, diverse international
    >audience. But the web also has certain long term advantages for
    >professional disciplines.

    Hats off to Charles Rhyne who has taken a great mass of material, presented it in a clear manner with an intuitive structure. Always professional in design and in photographic quality, Charles' images of the Getty Center should serve as a model for similar projects. To Charles' credit he has not encumbered his project with overly sophisticated and frivolous programming devices, but lets the subject speak for itself.

    In admiration of Charles' Getty Center project, but with considerably less elegance (and fewer resources), I have been experimenting with creating art historically significant pages of images with short narrative and/or critical texts -- all presented with nothing but simple html. (Each filename preserves the date and time of the original photograph.)

    Imagelib readers are invited to take a look and, hopefully, will offer suggestions for clearer or more useful presentations. Only simple, individually affordable technology is used on the pages below. Images come from a CoolPix900 (1280x960) camera that produces, at best, slightly compressed jpegs. I have used several variations in these pages, some big images are minimally compressed and some are highly compressed. Depending upon the image, some highly compressed versions seem quite passable and other's don't. It would be useful to hear the opinion of the imagelib group on this as well.

    The three monuments I cover are as follows:

    The New Rose Center Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History
    (80 images, largest being 640x480) http://www.studiolo.org/AMNH-Planetarium/index.htm

    Carpeaux's "Ugolino and his sons," MMA (9 images, largest 1280x960, minimally compressed) Taken under ambient conditions. http://www.studiolo.org/MMA-Ugolino/Ugolino.htm

    Presidential Circle Office Building, Hollywood, Florida (28 images, largest 1280x960, highly compressed) http://www.studiolo.org/Hywd-PresCircle/PresCircle.htm

    Thanks in advance for your comments. Also interested in the utility of the format as a repository of images useful for teaching. (Ignore the fact that there is no database retrieval system.)

    Thanks, in advance, to all.

    Robt Baron.

    =========================== Robert A. Baron mailto:mailto:rabaron@pipeline.com http://www.pipeline.com/~rabaron/

    </pre>

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