By Akron Art Museum Staff

In our update last month we discussed generating new digital material to accompany art objects in the Akron Art Museum’s collection.  We’ve also been using new technology to digitize older analog material from our archives. The Akron Art Museum has been adding new works to the collection for 87 years, so many of our pieces have a rich history that has been documented by analog photographs, slides, on paper and video tape. We’ve spent some time researching best scanning practices for our analog materials and proper file migration for supplementary material that had already been digitized. The work requires a time commitment and attention to detail but can be incredibly rewarding when great material is re-discovered. Finding old installation photographs or conservation notes can be both interesting to the casual art browser and very helpful to museum staff to document condition changes and plan new exhibitions.

“The Inverted Q”, a sculpture commissioned from Claes Oldenberg by the Akron Art Museum in 1976, has been moved to different locations, been conserved several times and has had its color completely changed in its life. We feel that showing these changes gives the piece more of an identity and we think that visitors to our online collection will enjoy discovering these supplementary materials we’ve been working to preserve.