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Australian National University Institute of the Arts Library

The Library of the Australian National University Institute of the Arts (ITA) in Canberra is using the Web in three separate but interrelated areas: the arts, education and training, and information provision. The Library's purpose is to support teaching, learning and research programmes in the visual and performing arts. It is committed to the promotion of the teaching of the visual and performing arts through the use of contemporary audio-visual and computer technology, including videos, CD-ROMs and electronically networked information.

As a multimedia resource centre for the visual and performing arts, the Library maintains and expands collections of a number of resources: slides, video and audio cassettes, performance scores, audio recordings, artists' files, and so on. It lends musical instruments and audio-visual equipment. When the arrival of Mosaic on the scene made the networking of visual images a practical possibility, putting up a Web server was seen as a logical extension of the Library's other activities. The ITA Library has several Web projects under way, run on networked Apple Macintoshes. They have already set up a virtual arts library, a virtual music library and an arts and technology educational resource.

The virtual arts library, AusArts, was set up with the intention of documenting the work created by the staff and students of the ITA. It is hoped that the project will bring the work of Australian artists to the attention of a much wider audience than would otherwise be possible, providing a `global art gallery' and creating a valuable teaching resource. The virtual arts library includes images of ceramics, textiles and glass and the ITA global electronic textiles exhibition, recently mounted, met with a very positive response. People may find it surprising that work in such an intrinsically tactile medium as textiles can be successfully displayed by electronic means. The idea for the virtual arts library was born when a display of staff work, recorded on Photo CD and shown on an Apple Macintosh computer, was mounted at an ITA Library open day. The artists, and others who were present, were amazed and delighted at the quality and integrity of the images, which really are good enough to convey a strong sense of the tactile qualities of the originals.

The AusArts project continues to use Photo CD as the initial digitizing medium, as it provides high resolution scanning and is quite economical. The general response to the project so far has been very favourable with a continuing high volume of Web access to the pages.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.