From Barron's Penta blog:
Art is going online, not just through virtual auctions, but also through online museum portals. It begs the question: If major museums around the world are digitizing their collections, should a private collector do likewise? What are the potential costs and benefits of doing so?
To answer such questions, first a little history. The fear of creating replicas of art, as explained in Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is that copies sap the aura and mystery around the original.
That view has proven remarkably resilient over time. Until recently, the world’s best museums held high-quality digital images close to their chest, reinforcing the notion that viewing originals on a wall is far superior to looking at them on a computer screen. The museum director’s concern, of course, was that by giving images away for free online, he or she would cannibalize attendance at their museum.
That concern suddenly doesn’t seem to carry much weight anymore. Over the past few years, the Smithsonian, London’s National Gallery of Art, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Vatican Library and most recently the Getty Research Institute have joined the open-content movement, posting thousands of downloadable images on their respective sites.
Jim Cuno, CEO of the Getty, tells Penta we are witnessing something akin to the institution-wide movement unleashed when the digital wave hit the music industry in the 1990’s. “When MP3s first came out, the common belief was that people would stop going to concerts, but people still go. There is every indication that [digital images] will increase appetites for the real thing,” he said.
While most agree it’s still too early to definitively argue digital reproductions on the Web can actually drive museum foot-traffic, the images are certainly getting eye-play. According to the Getty, web visits rose 15% to over 9 million last year, from 7.8 million in 2012. Physical visits to the Getty Center and Villa similarly rose to 1.7 million last year, up 8% from the 1.6 million who clocked in during 2012.
Chicago Albumen Works is a leader in digital archiving of works on paper, and has worked with the likes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. CEO Doug Munson declined giving specifics on the firm’s past and current projects, citing privacy, but encourages individuals to similarly consider the value of digitization, especially when it comes to private collections in family hands.
“Families that have approached us for digitization had private collections that have been passed down from the 19th and 20th century, and now there are three generations of people who are interested.” These families, Munson said, subsequently used digital images to create facsimile albums, scrapbooks and reproductions. “In addition, private collectors can enhance the value of their collections before a donation is made, to relieve the museums or historical societies of digitizing expenses,” he said.
In other words, increase awareness of your private collection, through making digital images available to the public, and the value of your collection should rise. Working exclusively with flat objects, particularly photographs, Housatonic, Mass.-based Albumen Works takes pride in working under the rules of museum-quality conservation. Munson said that the ubiquity of scanners has been an unfortunate fact for digitization. “It feels like you can push a button and that photo is magically on-screen,” Munson says. Furthermore, digitization a decade ago was inferior, mostly because industry standards hadn’t yet been developed.
While every firm’s methodology differs, the ones that aim to create archival-quality digital files adhere to standards put together by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative, says Eric Philcox, founder of Pixel Acuity. This Maitland, Florida-based firm offers digitization services for fine-art collections – including paintings, decorative objects and sculptures– and like Albumen Works digitizes under these more stringent conditions. That means producing high-resolution files suitable for the size of the image, using specialized cameras that provide color accuracy, luminosity, a high input of ppi or pixels per inch, metadata and other photo metrics....MORE
