As PAFA prepares for the installation of its major upcoming exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America, our Historic Landmark Building on Broad Street in Philadelphia has been completely deinstalled for the first time in decades. Given the rare opportunity to see the space emptied, the Collections team took the chance to fully document the interior spaces. The work is an important part of the archives’ mission to preserve records that will benefit not only future scholarship, but also provide important documentation to PAFA’s historic building.
The photographs will also be part of the Rising Sun exhibition planning files and help the the exhibition team learn and understand the intricacies involved when organizing a large and complex exhibition. Below are some images of the building today:
Views of the Historic Landmark Building from January 2023
Installation view of the Historic Landmark Building from the 1940’sInstallation view of the Historic Landmark Building from the 1950’sView of staff lifting Benjamin West’s Christ Reject, 1814, from 1974
Rising Sun is scheduled to open on March 23, 2023 and will include work from the artists Shiva Ahmadi, John Akomfrah CBE, La Vaughn Belle, Tiffany Chung, Lenka Clayton, Petah Coyne, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Demetrius Oliver, Eamon Ore-Giron, Alison Saar, Dread Scott, Rose B. Simpson, Sheida Soleimani, Renee Stout, Mark Thomas Gibson, Dyani White Hawk, Hank Willis Thomas, Deborah Willis, Wilmer Wilson IV, and Saya Woolfalk. You can find more information about the exhibition here.
Collections staff have begun beta testing the museum’s new content management system (CMS)–Axiell Collections. While a somewhat clerical sounding update, it is one that we are very excited about, as it marks the beginning of a major turning point in our department’s projects: the migration of our collection data and media from an aging and outdated system, to a modernized one that is better equipped to deal with our needs in the present.
For now we have been busy experimenting with a sandbox version of the software—learning how it works, what it can and cannot do. We are additionally beginning to build out a new batch of custom report templates that work with this new interface. “Reports,” in this case, are automatically generated documents that compile batch answers to various questions that we might want to ask of our database about a given group of works. Example questions might include “where was this group of paintings each most recently located,” or, “what are all the names, materials, and dimensions of all the works currently on exhibit?” Regardless, reports are an invaluable way for a range of museum staff to utilize the vast amount of information in the database, and we are excited to see these coming to life already.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Happy New Year from PAFA’s Collections Team! After an extended holiday break, we are busy getting back to work on our long term IMLS grant project. For now, this involves continuing to edit the new photographs that have been taken up to this point, but increasingly it has involved some new file management and organizing on our part. This is in preparation for the upcoming implementation of PAFA’s updated content management system and database, which our current work will migrate to in the coming weeks. When this happens, we will temporarily pivot into a robust testing phase to ensure that everything is working correctly, and that the new tools will function properly for both internal staff and the general public online.
Otherwise, as we enter a fresh calendar year, we are proud of the work that we have been able to accomplish in recent months, despite many unexpected setbacks. This included staff injuries, illness, and the need to share limited museum resources across several departments and multiple unrelated projects. All these issues have caused various delays, and on top of the normal slowdown around the holidays, our team has had to routinely find ways to stay on track within the larger grant schedule. These kinds of surprises are, of course, unavoidable during a lengthy project like this one, and we plan to keep revising our approach as needed to complete everything on time and at a high level of quality.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Happy Holidays from all of the PAFA staff! The archives and the Center for the Study of the American Artist will be closed on December 23, 2022 through January 2, 2023.
As part of our ongoing IMLS grant project to digitize portions of our collection, we are continuing to photograph works in our collection, but we are also beginning to process and edit some of these new images in preparation for their integration into PAFA’s databases.
If you have followed the Museum’s previous digitization initiatives, then you should know that these efforts are resource intensive. It is important that we take the time to digitally capture works of art that represent our collection as true-to-life as possible. To ensure we obtain high quality digital assets, there are two points in the digitization workflow that we focus on: 1. the moment we take the photo 2. the post-production work done after digital capture. For paintings and works on paper, this can be as simple as adjusting for the amount and color of the light, ensuring the work is square to the lens, and cropping as needed. For sculptures and 3-dimensional works, however, there are many additional variables that need addressing, including the consistency of the gradient background.
In a perfect world, the background would appear perfectly consistent across our hundreds of images, but this is not always the case. Often when shooting the images, the accuracy of the represented object must be prioritized over the look of the background, leaving artifacts in the image like folds in the paper or markings from other sculptures. To address this, we must correct these issues in post-production.
For every individual image that requires this correcting, we must break them down into three separate Photoshop layers: (1) an isolated background without the object (2) a copy of this isolated background without the object that has had a gaussian blur applied to it (3) a top layer that has only the isolated object. These layers are then carefully stitched together in such a way that the distractions of the “imperfect” background are fixed, while preserving all the necessary elements of the artwork (the object itself and its shadows) to create a clean, long-lasting, and useful image.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
An important step of the digitization workflow is post-production. This step always performed after the actual digital asset is created, hence the prefix “post”. This crucial process allows us to make minor adjustments for things like light and color, as well as cropping the dimensions to match the work being viewed. Sometimes, this is as simple as matching the rectangular edge of a TIFF file to the edge of a rectangular painting. Other times, this is more complicated, with works that are not perfectly square, are three-dimensional, or have other non-standard edges. In any case, it is our job to produce and maintain these cleaned up images—what we would call “access files” for broad dissemination to our audiences. These files are unique and distinct from our archival “master files,” which do not get the ‘post-production’ treatment and are kept for posterity.
It has been a slow task, with the need to go through and edit images one by one, but we are nearly finished. In fact, the Museum is almost ready to integrate these legacy files with the newly photographed works of art taken this year.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
One of the more interesting groups of works in PAFA’s collection that is being digitized for our current IMLS grant is a set of personal Polaroids taken by Andy Warhol. These were largely created during the 70’s and 80’s and whose subjects include what seem like friends, models, and Warhol himself, all in various poses and stages of attire and undress that, when seen together, read like something between art reference photos and contemporary social media posts. Returning figures include named entities like “Kimiko Powers,” “Mr. Black,” or “Ted Hartley,” among other unidentified individuals. Some feel candid, while others clearly posed and staged, but something about them all feel both intimate and enigmatic. Within PAFA’s larger permanent collection, with its historic slant and focus on traditional techniques and subjects, these entries are certainly unique.
About the Institute of Museum and Library ServiceThe Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
We are nearing the end of the weeks-long process of renaming the files in our digital collection. As mentioned before, this work was important for establishing a file naming convention/schema to improve its usefulness and accessibility both internally and externally. Doing so is one of many parts of our IMLS grant project, and so far, has included a combination of automated computer scripting via Python, and slowly combing through the filenames by hand.
With this combination of tools, we were able to confidently correct the names of approximately 16,000 files, which was a huge step forward for the project and PAFA’s collection team. During this process, however, we identified over 1,000 files that were either unnecessary duplicates or were files that did not carry with it enough information to adequately identify them in our database.
These duplicate and mystery files arose from the old folder structures that we are no longer using and have recently phased out as part of this file renaming process. Formerly, things could hide and get copied, moved, updated, and renamed without any meaningful way to ensure that outdated or unnecessary files are removed. In the process of migrating files to fewer sub-directories, which use only their unique accession number to identify them, it became immediately clear which files need review and correction, beyond a simple renaming.
Once the duplicates were double checked, they were easily discarded. The unknown files, however, we had no way of knowing how important any given file might be. Out of a commitment to thoroughness the collections team decided to work together to identify several hundred of these files, often by finding some physical works in our storage vault that could be related. Only after reasonable certainty could be reached would we know for sure how to rename (and then either keep or discard) these mystery files. This process alone took around two weeks but has resulted in a repaired digital archive that is ready for the introduction of our new high-resolution photography from this year.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The Museum Collections Team is pleased to introduce L Autumn Gnadinger (they/them/theirs), who will be stepping into the role of the Museums Collections Assistant through the remainder of the IMLS grant project. L is an artist, writer, and educator with a background in museum work. They earned their MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and have previously studied at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, IN and Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. L is a former Core Fellow of Penland School of Craft in Bakersville, NC, and an editor and co-founder of the journal Ruckus, which engages art in the American Midsouth and Midwest.
With a range of experience in photography, design, and file management stemming from their work with Ruckus, L will be helping PAFA with its core goals of photographing works of art in the permanent collection, updating the file management connected to the permanent collection, and finally testing out the new content management system for the new—forthcoming—online collection.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
In addition to rephotographing the permanent collection, the other goal of our current IMLS grant is the streamlining and unification of our file management and file naming systems for our digitized collections. Given PAFA’s long history and the many hands that have made the Museum possible since its founding, there have been many different organizing schemes to keep the collection in order, and since the advent of digitized collection and databases, many more still to keep the file names organized.
In 2022, we have inherited many generations of images and information, and to best carry them forward in a safe and useful way—and to prepare for the migration to a new database soon—we need to reorganize and rename all the files in our digital collection.
To summarize the issue: every artwork is different, and over the years the file names of PAFA’s digital collection have prioritized different information like artwork names, artist names, year of creation, names of donors, location the image was taken, conservation notes, and finally, the accession number, just to name a few. Our goal was to standardize these file names with what they all have in common and what is most unique to them—their accession number.
This number, generally, is a compound of many different pieces of information such as the year PAFA acquired it, which acquisition group or gift did a work come to PAFA through in that year, and what number in each group is the artwork itself (among other pieces of information). From this number, we can easily link a specific artwork to any corresponding information we have about it in our database.
Take the number 2004.20.4, which is the accession number for the work Conjunction by Romare Bearden. We might find this filename in our database as “BEARDEN-2004_20_4.tif,” which, can certainly be used to correctly identify this work as it has done since it was acquired by PAFA in 2004, but even the addition of the last name of “BEARDEN-” as a prefix to the accession number makes for clunky cross-system use when not all the other file names match this same scheme.
The process for us to rename all these files, on paper, is simple enough. We just need to look for their accession number in the file name (usually buried under or inside of other unnecessary information) and replace all of this with just the simple accession number by itself. But this becomes immediately complicated as we find accession numbers that are formatted differently from one another or use version codes that are inconsistent with each other year to year.
To do this by hand, file by file, is, of course, technically possible but would be incredibly tedious and time-consuming. Thankfully, we have found a way to write and implement custom computer code (more commonly called a “script”) to automate most of this process using the programming language Python.
Python is an incredibly flexible and powerful coding language, and through a variety of techniques, we have been able to instruct these custom scripts to automatically identify what is (and isn’t) a PAFA accession number among other kinds of information inside of a file name, and then delete what isn’t wanted or required. The script also helps us flag files that don’t have a proper accession number at all, or have more complicated naming issues, which we can then set aside to look at by hand. The result, after applying the script to over 26,000 files, is a unified and easy to use set of file names, and a database overall that is ready for migration to a new and better system.
This blog post is part of an ongoing series about Digital Collections that we are able to undertake thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. We advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development. Our vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit https://www.imls.gov/and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
