Everyone who does historic research on a regular basis appreciates the beauty of primary source documentation, so I hope a few of you will join me in smiling over this past week's announcement from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. If you're not familiar with this resource, the Archives of American Art is a treasure trove of catalogue lists, citations, oral history interview transcripts and much, much more as pertains to many individual American painters, draftsmen and -women, sculptors and collectors. Because it is extremely labor intensive to scan original paperwork, however, there was an understandable lack of such on the website. Until now.
Thanks to a generous $3.6 million (US) grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the AAA has embarked on an ambitious, five year digitization project expected to make freely available a " ...substantial cross-section of the Archives' most important holdings, including the papers of a highly diverse range of artists and arts-related figures from the eighteenth century to today." An estimated 1.6 million digital files will be available at the end of the program.
Being the impatient sort, I could not wait five years for the full list of more than 100 archival collections to be published and had to check out Phase One now. After figuring out how the viewer works (which took a while), I was completely hooked to the point that supper wasn't ready here until quite late in the evening two nights ago. I highly recommend this resource to my fellow art history research buffs, and urge you to check out the first offerings here.
Thanks to a generous $3.6 million (US) grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the AAA has embarked on an ambitious, five year digitization project expected to make freely available a " ...substantial cross-section of the Archives' most important holdings, including the papers of a highly diverse range of artists and arts-related figures from the eighteenth century to today." An estimated 1.6 million digital files will be available at the end of the program.
Being the impatient sort, I could not wait five years for the full list of more than 100 archival collections to be published and had to check out Phase One now. After figuring out how the viewer works (which took a while), I was completely hooked to the point that supper wasn't ready here until quite late in the evening two nights ago. I highly recommend this resource to my fellow art history research buffs, and urge you to check out the first offerings here.
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