Great links for Archivists

If you are interested in Archives, here are some good links that have been helpful for me.

Archives Gig: (Great listings for Jobs)
http://archivesgig.livejournal.com/

That Elusive Archives Job: (Great site for applying for jobs)
http://elusivearchives.blogspot.com/2010/04/table-of-contents.html

Archives Next:
http://www.archivesnext.com/


Here are the validation links that I found helpful:

For HTML, XHTML - etc.
http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_uri+with_options

For CSS
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

You can upload the file or enter the URL to validate.

If you click on "more options"

and check "clean up markup with HTML tidy" - it will give you suggestions - or at least tell you where the errors are. It may take some work to figure out how to correct the error.


COOL: COnservation OnLine (its really cool - pun intended- but really it is)
http://cool.conservation-us.org/

SAA Glossary of Archival Terminology (really helpful)
http://www.archivists.org/glossary/

ODLIS: Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science (also really helpful)
http://lu.com/odlis/

Internet Archives (Check out the Wayback Machine and Archive It)
http://www.archive.org/

One more week!

It is really hard to believe that this first semester is almost over. I am mostly proud of myself for all that I have learned about in this short period of time, but mostly in regards to computers and the Internet. It is something that is really intimidating and very daunting to me. This course have motivated me to continue to learn and play with my computer and not to be so scared of it. I am actually thinking really seriously about creating a website of my own to display my portfolio of work and resume. I am actually very excited about taking on the task.

I have enjoyed the first semester here and I am really glad I have chosen to get my degree from this program, but I do have to say, I will be really happy to start to take classes that are more focused on Archives and Preservation. I can really see how these first two classes are important, but wish the professors could have addressed the lectures to suit all specializations, not just libraries. I wrote all my papers to address issues in archives and focused on preservation, this being the area I am specializing in and interested in, but I felt I was not really addressing the question posed to write about, although I received good grades on them.

I am a little scared to create my Portfolio of work done this semester, but feel that I think I know what I need to do. Just hope it all works out to be what I want it to be. Just found out about my quiz grade. I am OK with it. It is better than how I did for the first one, so I could not ask for more.

Quiz complete!

I just completed the quiz. Like the first one I took, I really have no idea how I might have done. Time will tell. I really hope that I did OK. There was one question in particular that I really was not sure what he was asking for. I answered it for what I think he was wanted and how he prepped us for the quiz in the lecture. If I answered it wrong, I hope I can get particle credit.

I have been overwhelmed with how technology has been affecting the conservation field these past couple of weeks. It is great to see all this in the news about the field. Here is another article for anyone interested in Master's works and how science is effecting the conservation field and allowing us to understand the techniques and the artists better.

French scientists crack secrets of Mona Lisa

AP – This recent undated photo provided Friday July 23, 2010, by the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research) …

ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer Angela Doland, Associated Press Writer – Fri Jul 16, 9:38 pm ET

PARIS – The enigmatic smile remains a mystery, but French scientists say they have cracked a few secrets of the "Mona Lisa." French researchers studied seven of the Louvre Museum's Leonardo da Vinci paintings, including the "Mona Lisa," to analyze the master's use of successive ultrathin layers of paint and glaze - a technique that gave his works their dreamy quality.

Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety. Added up, all the layers are less than 40 micrometers, or about half the thickness of a human hair, researcher Philippe Walter said Friday.

The technique, called "sfumato," allowed da Vinci to give outlines and contours a hazy quality and create an illusion of depth and shadow. His use of the technique is well-known, but scientific study on it has been limited because tests often required samples from the paintings.

The French researchers used a noninvasive technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to study the paint layers and their chemical composition.

They brought their specially developed high-tech tool into the museum when it was closed and studied the portraits' faces, which are emblematic of sfumato. The project was developed in collaboration with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.

The tool is so precise that "now we can find out the mix of pigments used by the artist for each coat of paint," Walter told The Associated Press. "And that's very, very important for understanding the technique."

The analysis of the various paintings also shows da Vinci was constantly trying out new methods, Walter said. In the "Mona Lisa," da Vinci used manganese oxide in his shadings. In others, he used copper. Often he used glazes, but not always.

The results were published Wednesday in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a chemistry journal.

Tradition holds that the "Mona Lisa" is a painting of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and that da Vinci started painting it in 1503. Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century painter and biographer of da Vinci and other artists, wrote that the perfectionist da Vinci worked on it for four years.

Here is a link to an article in The New York Times about Art, Fakes and Science. This is something that I enjoy, thought maybe the science and technology aspect my interest some others.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/design/13abroad.html

---

July 12, 2010

Old Masters and Modern Science

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

LONDON — At first blush “Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries,” here at the National Gallery, has the quaint, cheerfully scholastic earnestness of a science fair. Some 30 pictures from the permanent collection, most of them culled from storage, have been enlisted to anchor a flurry of wall texts, X-rays and the sort of enlarged microscopic cross sections of layered pigments and varnish vaguely resembling the cautionary photographs of plaque that elementary school teachers flourish before floss-wary fourth graders.

A celebratory primer on polarized light microscopy and other cumbersomely termed diagnostic tools employed by conservators today to determine when and how a picture was made, the show may sound like homework.

But it isn’t; far from it. It’s one of those gems, which, amid the hard science, stumbles onto squishier truths about what we are really looking for when we look at art. Out to instruct us in the chemistry of painting, it ends up suggesting how elusive art remains despite all the gadgets that we devise to master it.

Along the way it riffs on the mistaken-identity theme: a picture given in good faith by the City of Nuremberg to Charles I in 1636 as a work by Dürer that’s proved to be a copy; a copy of a Veronese that, after grime is removed, emerges as the genuine article. And there are forgeries, art’s whodunits, pandering to our basest instinct for knocking experts off pedestals. People love fakes because fakes play into the populist suspicion that much art is really just a scam, a suspicion encouraged by the fancy names wrongly attached to and insane prices often paid for the stuff.

Names, dates, prices, provenance — they do promise solid ground. In museums and galleries we can very often feel as if we’re adrift, swimmers on the open sea. Another Madonna and Child? Find the wall label. Raphael. O.K. We’re safe to grunt and nod approvingly.

I’m exaggerating, of course. We have plenty of serious reasons to seek out names and numbers connected to pictures: we need them to write history and occasionally to remind ourselves, when these names and numbers turn out to be wrong, not only of scam artists but also of the whole infinitude of human folly.

There is, for example, the Italian Renaissance painting of a young woman, brunet, demure and wide-eyed, standing before a window, that entered the National Gallery’s collection in the mid-19th-century. Was it by Lorenzo Lotto or Palma Vecchio? Experts debated. Either way, she was a beauty, they agreed, despite her blemish: a layer of damage visible just beneath her hair, which conservators only got around to checking in 1978.

They discovered — you guessed it — that the demure brunette covered up a sultry blonde whose hair had been darkened, jaw line and brow softened, eyes widened and breasts made more discreet to contrive what the unknown “restorer” more than a century ago thought fellow Victorians would regard as a comelier Renaissance portrait. The original was still Italian, still Renaissance, although hardly like the faux-Renaissance version that masked it.

To modern eyes the cleaned picture looks more striking, while the shenanigans that passed for conservation a century ago only prove how taste is hostage to its era. No doubt methods contemporary conservators use to restore art that we believe are unprejudiced and sage will come to seem just as time-bound and clueless eventually.

But isn’t this painting also more than just an object lesson in historical subjectivity? A different Italian picture, also acquired over a century ago by the gallery, shows another blonde, this time reclining in a landscape. It is titled “The Allegory,” for want of a better idea of what it’s about. Experts agreed when it was bought that it was by Botticelli, and the gallery forked over a fortune for it, more than it paid for a second Botticelli at the same auction from the same collector.

Critics tooted a few horns when “The Allegory” went on view, but there was one skeptic who wrote to the director — there’s always one! — and gradually she was joined by others, and soon the prize picture was becoming a kind of embarrassment to the gallery, which had to concede that maybe it wasn’t by Botticelli after all, because even everyday visitors now said they saw something seriously wrong with it. The blonde looked like a cartoon character, a costumed feline out of “Cats,” ham-fisted and nothing like the other, cheaper Botticelli the gallery had bought, which steadily rose in estimation to be regarded as a treasure and ingenious purchase

Presumed to be a fake, “The Allegory” soon ended up in storage where modern conservators one day, just for curiosity’s sake, decided to take another look. They realized it wasn’t fake. In fact it was an old master painting, from Botticelli’s day, just as those deluded experts had thought in the 19th century, even if Botticelli may not have been the old master who painted it. Although who knows? Maybe he was.

So “The Allegory” is what, then? A case study in dubious connoisseurship or mad money or gullible criticism?

It’s a picture. And the picture is the same whether it is said to be old or new, genuine or fake, an original or a copy. It becomes no more or less elegant or funny looking. Its role in the evolving narratives of art history changes. Its price can go up or down. But cost is not value.

And that’s what we’re looking for when we look at art, no? Something of value, deeper and more meaningful than a name or a number, which can’t be gotten out of a test tube or lab report, which, emotionally speaking, requires an effort on our part. It demands that we look for ourselves.

And then you never know what you might find. A “Virgin and Child With an Angel,” an early work by Francesco Francia, the Bolognese master and contemporary of Raphael, for years was said by the gallery to exemplify the painter’s training as a goldsmith. Its refinement was admired. Then an identical picture turned up. Gallery conservators examined their version and found that the tiny aging cracks on the surface had actually been painted, faked. Further studies revealed the use of latter-day pigments like chrome yellow, and an underdrawing that seemed more 19th century than Renaissance.

The work was a forgery. Science proved it. And so there it hangs in the show, on a wall of shame, surrounded like a mug shot by the evidence of its true crime.

But look, never mind what the label says, and you may notice something else about the picture, too, some other truth.

It’s beautiful.

Fastrack Weekend

The first fastrack weekend done!!! I was so nervous about meeting everyone and figuring out the campus. I think everything went pretty well. A lot of the information would have been a lot nicer to have had maybe the first week of classes to prior to starting classes. I am not quite sure why they make the fastrack weekend in the middle of the semester, especially for the first semester. Did not get a chance to wander around Pittsburgh that much, but I feel that I will have plenty of other opportunity to do in the next year or so. There was really no need to run around and see everything this time around.

I think the exam went pretty well for me. I studied pretty hard and was really nervous about this. I do not always test well, do to nerves. Now it is off to write this paper on copyright issues. This has been the only paper that I have been really procrastination about. I do not know to much about the subject, nor find it terribly interesting. I hope that I can find a way to twist it into a preservation paper.

Had the most frustrating evening figuring out the website assignment. Thanks to all the people that wrote in and helped, I was able to get it up and viewable. It is not quite the format I had, but it is going to have to work. I sill can not figure out how to get my background to work and I want to put a photo on my "home" page and can not get that to transfer either. I will keep playing, if I can find the time this week.

It was a real pleasure to meet everyone this weekend and I look forward to coming back in October and seeing everyone again.

Falling Water

Just got back from Pittsburgh. It is a long drive from me, so my plan is to try to take a day or so each time I come out for school to make a side trip to sites that I want to see and discover. This visit side trip was to see Frank Loyd Wright's Falling Water. It was great. I feel so lucky to have been able to see this. I feel like I was walking through my Art History textbook. It is such a surreal experience when you read and see something so much in a book to actually get to see and experience it. This side trip detour was absolutely the highlight of my mini Pittsburgh trip. I am excited to start to plan my next detour on my way to Pittsburgh!!

Derangement and Description

I have been making contacts with some Archivists in my area and was directed to view a very creative blog created by Rebecca Goldman of Drexel University Archives. Not only are the comics very amusing and entertaining, there are also some handy links and a blogroll to other very interesting blogs by others in the Archival field.

http://derangementanddescription.wordpress.com/

Take a look at it. Hope you find it as entertaining and creative as I do!!