ArtServe ======== A Description of the WWW/Mosaic Server in the Department of Art History, Australian National University (http://rubens.anu.edu.au) and of Imaging & CDROM Plans by Michael Greenhalgh, MA, PhD, FSA The Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History email: gremarth@fac.anu.edu.au email: Mike. Greenhalgh@anu.edu.au tel: 61-06-249-2701 fax: 61-06-249-2705 ELECTRONIC IMAGING PRE-1994 Several of the materials which are now on ArtServe were made available on servers in the Netherlands and the USA in the second half of 1993: - Tutorial on "The 'Palace' of the Emperor Diocletian at Split": 15Mb of text and images; - Presentations totalling 21Mb of material related to Art History, principally on Prints & Print-Making; INSTALLATION OF A WWW SERVER ArtServe went live on 4th January 1994, and currently gets about 2,800 accesses per day from all over the world. The material on offer consists of: - The Diocletian tutorial mentioned above; - 2,800 images of 'Prints & Print History", together with their associated data files, available both with inline thumbnail images and via a fill-in-the-form database-query interface. The images date from the beginning of printmaking to about 1900, so as to avoid copyright problems; - 2,600 images of "Architecture of the Mediterranean Basin", currently available only via a fill-in-the-forms database-query interface; these are all taken by myself; - A TextSearcher (commissioned by me), which operates with plain ASCII text files and also with HTML files; - A 120,000-word book, written by me, on "The Greek and Roman Cities of Western Turkey", "sliced up" into HTML format. This is published here as my contribution to the credibility (in terms of scholarship) of the Internet: i.e. we must use the Internet for publication, otherwise its status will be that of an emailing or publicity billboard or toy. When I have time, the book will be linked to over 2,000 images (some of them counted in the 2,600 art & architecture images mentioned above); USING THE TECHNOLOGY FOR TEACHING & LEARNING We are gearing up to make sets of images seen by our students network available. Two of our units in 1994 ("Introduction to Art History", 870 images; and "Introduction to Modern Art"; 900 images) have all images network available. For 1995, at least four of our standard Art History course units ("Introduction to Art History", "Introduction to Modern Art", "Art & Architecture of the Italian Renaissance", and "The Art of the Print") will have access within the Department to banks of images (about 1,000 per unit) made available to them under WWW/Mosaic, and served via rubens.anu.edu.au either from hard disk or from computer-driven laserdisk. To the best of my knowledge, this setup represents a world first in IT teaching in the Humanities. We estimate that 120 students will be enrolled on Art History 1A, 95 on Art History 1B, 60 on "Art & Architecture of the Italian Renaissance", and 70 on "The Art of the Print". During first semester 1994, all images seen in our first-year first semester unit (Art History 1A) were made available with inline GIFs under a WWW/Mosaic interface. These 800+ images are available as http://rubens/ah1a.html. The same setup was also used to present a selection of these slides for a visual test, as it was for our later-year Australian Art unit on http://rubens/students.xmosaic/pics/sasha/Index1.html. For the second semester first-year unit, the same system will again be used for all the images they see, which will be at http://rubens/ah1b.html. The same system will be used - some 1,900 images in all - in 1995, as preliminary tests indicate that it works well, aids learning, and the students like it. Already available for "The Art of the Print" (second semester) is a core of some 2,800 images on CRDOM, also accessible under WWW/Mosaic, as http://rubens/prints_form.html. Also available is a preliminary store of 840 images for the 1995 first-semester unit on Michael Greenhalgh's "The Art & Architecture of the Italian Renaissance", again with a WWW/Mosaic front-end, on http://rubens/renaissance3/index.html. The technology used here is exciting, for it uses the immense reservoir of laserdisk storage. The user currently sees a sorted listing of records, and selects the required image; the computer addresses the laserdisk, which presents the image to the framegrabber; after being digitized, the image is sent over the network in the usual way. Soon the user will have the same system enhanced by (a) inline thumbnail GIFs, as in the standard ArtServe setup already described; and (b) a switch allowing downward scaling of the retrieved "full-size" image, to make the setup more useful over a busy network or with a slow and small machine. This course unit will, as far as possible, be completely digital (except for the lecturer, who remains analog; and the lectures, which will use slides): apart from a one-page initial handout giving information about accessing the system, almost everything else (schedules, tutorial assignments, lecture topics, essay questions, bibliography, assessment questionnaires, and especially the images shown during lectures and tutorials) will be digital. PROBLEMS WITH THE PRESENT SETUP 1. Although ArtServe has gained plaudits from all over the world (including one Internet prize and two Honourable Mentions), things are still rather messy. The Prints & the Architecture file need tidying up, and more images are needed for both. I simply haven't the time to do this - I need a Research Assistant; 2. I must look to the future, when current resolutions (mine are currently 760x525 pixels, or one-third of a megapixel). See below ("Plans for Image Quality Improvement"). WORK IN PROGRESS 1. Development of the "Salami Slicer", which takes a data file, and slices it up painlessly into HTML format, automatically writing the HTML code and the image references required. Nearly finished, this will give complete flexibility in the size of pages formatted, the number of images they contain (they can have just records - no images), and the quantity and order of the fields in the data record; 2. Writing of a data file for 11,000 images of European art and architecture, all of them taken by me, which currently reside on a laserdisk. 3. In connection with (2)I have commissioned and can demonstrate code which (1) has WWW/Mosaic request a frame from the laserdisk; (2) framegrab and digitize the frame; (3) send it out across the network; (4) write the image either to a Mosaic document or to an external image file; and (5) apply any percent of scaling to the operation. This technology means that (subject to copyright) commercial laserdisks can be fed across a network, and be used by more than one person in more than one location. The last bit of code to write is some kind of stacking, so that 2+ accesses in close proximity will get what they want, rather than some brush-off message; SUGGESTIONS FOR PUBLICATION Although the network is its own publication medium, I think CDROM is proving to be viable, and will soon be commonplace. All the material above is susceptible to a bit of massaging which would fit it for later-year college students, and undergraduates - a package of Art History Learning materials. To what I already can demonstrate (suitably improved, as I have said), we could add: - "Essential Art History", co-written by me with my colleague Dr Paul Duro, which would make an admirable reference vade mecum for students - the more so when we link it with a few (or a lot of) images; - Dr Duro's current project, "An Index of European Art 1300-1800" would provide an electronic subject listing of artworks, and would admirably complement the materials already on the server; - a plethora of links to other sites of the Internet, which would provide information about the Web itself, as well as "art" materials which would extend what went on the CDROM - books, museum collections, some guided tours through galleries, and some Internet-mounted exhibitions of artworks. Subject to negotiation, there is no reason why some of these should not be laid onto the CDROM, space permitting. SUGGESTED FIRST PRODUCT All the items mentioned above would probably fit on one CDROM, including the Mosaic client software (which is freely distributable unless used commercially, and works WITHOUT a network if need be). That is, by current images take up about 480Mb of space - say 500Mb after winnowing and some additions. The two texts mentioned above ("Essential Art History" and "Index of European Art") would not occupy much more than 2Mb, and could largely be illustrated by some of the existing 500MB of images. But the best bet for a quick job (under 12 months) would be to take the Prints Database, augment the current 2,800 images, and improve all the records, turning it into a "History of European Art through Prints" by adding introductory texts, comments, and even a few (out-of-copyright) reference works, such as The Bible and Shakespeare. Counting some 3500 images of prints in JPEG format, these would occupy (roughly) some 340Mb. The CDROM would be written in ISO format, be readable on Macintoshes and under DOS/Windows as well as X-Window, and include the Mosaic clients for each platform. In other words, what is viewable across the network is also viewable locally, on one machine without a network. PLANS FOR IMAGE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT Computer imaging is today capable of generating very high quality images, and they can easily be stored in small quantities on hard disks, which are getting cheaper all the time. The snag is that current display technologies cannot easily manipulate images over - say - 1Mb in size. Anyone needing to deal electronically with large quantities of images (e.g. over 20,000) clearly wants to do the work involved only once, to be able immediately to display the images using current technology, but also to have to hand higher-quality images which will not look frankly silly in a few years when display technology has improved and come down in price - i.e. for the next generation of CDROM projects. I propose the installation of a system which meets the above requirements, and makes use not only of high-quality analog and digital technologies, and of the Tape Robot, but can also serve the images transparently over the Internet (or any restricted subset of it), using WWW/Mosaic. The data records are written for BOTH systems at the SAME time. The setup, which costs about $100,000, involves: (1) a digital camera which can write digitized images at 1.6 million pixels (compare video resolution, which can never offer more than a maximum of 400 thousand pixels); this dumps the results to a hard disk on a Macintosh, via a Photoshop plug-in; (2) a Sony recordable laserdisk player (which I already have), which captures up to 36,000 archival-quality analog images on each side of its removable cartridge; (3) an autochanger for a Sony recordable laserdisk player which, when associated with the player in (2) above allows computer and hence network access for up to 15 cartridges (at over 72,000 frames per disk) and therefore to over one million images on line; The setup envisages the processing of large quantities of images, each one of which is written AT THE SAME TIME to a writeable laserdisk and to the Digital Camera system; the common data record is written at the same time. Scanning (which can produce huge files) is not an option, because it is too slow for dealing with anything but a small quantity of images. The equipment will be used for archival storage for research and teaching-related imaging in the Department of Art History, and all the images will (subject to any copyright restrictions) be available under WWW/Mosaic. The work will proceed in three stages: STAGE ONE: I can already demonstrate network-transparent access to frames on a laserdisk - i.e. video-quality images. The datafile is regimented under WWW/Mosaic, with or without inline thumbnail images, and a request for a full-size image has the computer accessing the laserdisk frame, offering it to the framegrabber, digitizing it, and sending it off across the network to the recipient. Still to be developed for this setup are (a) resolving the contention when a frame is requested and the framegrabber and laserdisk player are busy; (b) implementation of a scaling option for the WWW/Mosaic pages, which already works with specific requests to the URL, but not yet with Mosaic pages: the user could ask for any proportion of scaling for an image. This will help people with slow lines, or even modems; it could be very useful indeed if something similar were to be applied to Tape Robot material (see below); STAGE TWO: Using the SEPS Digital Camera, large quantities of 35mm slide material, and photographs and prints, will be digitized and stored on a local hard disk. Software needs developing for sending such files (Each 1.6-megapixel file is some 4.5Mb in size) to the Tape Robot for storage, for checking them, and then deleting them locally. STAGE THREE: Building on Stages One and Two, software needs developing to give WWW/Mosaic clients flexibility in the quality of images they retrieve. Remembering that there will be ONE datafile which will point both to ONLINE material under WWW/Mosaic and OFFLINE material stored on the Tape Robot, the network user should be able to request (a) video-quality images, which are typically 80Kb full-size in JPEG format, or indeed at any percentage of this size; and (b) make requests for the higher-quality 4.5Mb images, or any percentage of this size, which will be stored on the Tape Robot. Software will therefore be necessary: (a) to retrieve image files from the Tape Robot; (b) to scale them if and when requested by the user; (c) to send them directly to the user, or leave them in some "pool" where they can be downloaded by the user, perhaps in dead of night using ftp; and finally (d) to perform (a) and (b) through the WWW/Mosaic interface, and perhaps set (c) in trail as well. Last revision: 21st July, 1994