Curator's Choice
On the first Tuesday of each month the Public Domain Review feature a special guest post from a gallery, library, archive or museum curator reflecting upon a group of works in one of their open digital collections – that is, public domain material which has had no restrictions placed on it as it’s been digitised and made available online.
The Curator's Choice series aims to be a celebratory spotlight on both the institutions making the exciting steps of openly licensing their digital collections and also the curators that work everyday with such collections – as well, of course, as being a celebration of the content itself.
Below we give the collections the Curator's choice focus on. Links to the more detailed blog post are given in the Collection metadata.
Pat Hadley, Sarah King and Stuart Ogilvy from The Yorkshire Museum (York Museums Trust), present a fascinating selection of photographs from the collection of Tempest Anderson, the pioneering Victorian volcanologist.
Hanna-Leena Paloposki, chief curator and archive- and library manager at the Finnish National Gallery, presents a selection from the gallery’s collection of Daniel Nyblin glass negatives, a collection comprised of the photographer’s lesser known images of artworks.
Alison Metcalfe, curator in the Manuscript and Archive Collections department of the National Library of Scotland, presents the Library’s collection of photographs recording the construction of the Forth Bridge, the first major structure in Britain to be made of steel and a milestone in civil engineering.
To mark the 100 years since Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) fought the Gallipoli campaign of WW1, Alison Wishart, Senior Curator of Photographs at Australian War Memorial, explores the remarkable photographic record left by the soldiers. Made possible by the birth of Kodak’s portable camera, the photographs give a rare and intimate portrait of the soldier’s day-to-day life away from the heat of battle.
Harry van Biessum, from Open Images, gives a little tour through some of the collection’s stranger films, in particular those Dutch newsreels from the 1930s which centred on reporting a wide-variety of bizarre competitions.
Michael J. North, Head of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts in NLM’s History of Medicine Division, takes a look at one the highlights of the Library’s Turning the Pages project, a Mongolian manuscript concerned with interpreting the heavens.
Lissa Mitchell, Curator of Historical Documentary Photography at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, explores the work of three photographers creating autochromes in early 20th-century New Zealand.
Dr Lynley Anne Herbert, Robert and Nancy Hall Assistant Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Walters Art Museum, investigates a mysterious image and accompanying rebus found within the pages of a liber amicorum or “friendship book”, an album for recording friendships.
Julia Grimes, research assistant at the Getty Research Institute, introduces a fascinating selection of images from the Pierre de Gigord Collection detailing Armenian life in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, many from the studio of Armenian photographers Pascal Sebah and the Abdullah Frères.
Matthew Hargraves, Chief Curator of Art Collections at the Yale Center for British Art, looks at Paul Mellon as a collector of William Blake and the impact of his lifelong fascination with psychology and psychiatry on his collecting.
Sarah Toulouse, Head of the Rare Books and Cultural Heritage Department at Bibliothèque de Rennes Métropole, explores the mystery behind a couple of strange and unexpected images found in a 15th-century book of hours.
John Overholt, Curator at Houghton Library, shines a spotlight on a few examples from the eclectic lot of cabinet card photographs found in the Harvard Theatre Collection, a series of images which are currently making their way onto Wikimedia Commons courtesy of the Wikipedian in Residence scheme.
Catherine Draycott, head of Wellcome Images, gives a run down of the Top 10 most downloaded images from the collection of more than 100,000 that the Wellcome Library made available free from restrictions earlier this year.
Sandra Tuppen, curator of Music Manuscripts at the British Library, explores some highlights from their digitised collection of music manuscripts, including those penned by the hand of Haydn, Handel, Purcell, and a very messy Beethoven.
Marieke van Delft, curator of early printed editions at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), discusses the works of the prolific writer Johannes Florentius Martinet (1729-1795), digitized in the Early Dutch Books Online (EDBO) Project.
Patrick Borer, from the Zentralbibliothek Solothurn, picks out some highlights from their collection of 18th-century prints and looks at what they tell us about life in a Swiss city state.
Laura Bang, curatorial assistant at Villanova University’s Special Collections and Digital Library, and Ruth Martin, Digital Library intern, explore an early 20th-century scrapbook put together by Company 62 of the New York City Fire Department.
Mike Kelly, curator at the Archives and Special Collections of Amherst College, explores highlights from their Emily Dickinson collection, a huge variety of manuscript forms – from concert programmes to chocolate wrappers – which give us a fascinating insight into how the poet worked.
Jo Pugh, researcher at the UK National Archives, explores the newly digitised letters of former British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and his sister Hester, and how their contents shed an intimate light on one of the most politically influential families in British history.
Henrik Holm, curator at the National Gallery of Denmark, looks at the making of the Danish painting canon and its relation to the construction of a national identity.
Daniel Horst, research associate at the Rijksmuseum, explores the controversial collection of satirical etchings published by Abraham Allard in Amsterdam ca. 1708 under the title ‘t Lusthof van Momus.