Moving a large painting into studio for digital capture
One of the numerous projects that I’ve had the privilege of working on recently is Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF). PCF is a charity based organisation that aims to increase access to paintings by creating a series of colour catalogues on a county-by-county basis. Eventually PCF hope to provide access free of charge to the collection through a website.
The task we had at the National Library of Wales (NLW) was to hand pick, digitise and gather metadata on roughly 2000 oil or acrylic paintings held at the Library. Choosing and digitising the paintings fell onto others responsibility, they encountered various problems varying from broken cameras to copyright issues. Paintings were chosen from artists such as J M W Turner, Richard Wilson, Thomas Gainsborough and Kyffin Williams.
Moving a large painting into studio for digital capture
My task involved converting metadata from the standard NLW format (VTLS Virtua catalogue) to the PCF format (Excel Spreadsheet) using eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). This process also provided problems and often found myself dreaming of testing the durability of my computer screen!!!
NLW’s work on the project will be finished in the coming weeks where we will be supplying digital copies of the paintings along with metadata to PCF. The catalogues will be available from PCF during 2012.