By Akron Art Museum Staff

The Akron Art Museum staff has begun our two year project of making our entire collection accessible online. We’ve hired Keith Freund to be our Collections Information Coordinator. Keith formerly managed our donor database as part of the museum’s development department, and has a master’s degree in library and information science with an emphasis in archiving. He’ll be organizing some of our previously generated data, as well as creating new information for our collection database…

Over the past few weeks we’ve done extensive research and consulting to determine what hardware and software will be ideal for our project, and we’ve started to purchase those tools and train on them already.

Our curatorial department has been meeting with other departments and staff to see how the database would best work for them, both in a practical and ideal way as we move forward with design. Everyone at the museum is very excited to make the online collection interesting and easy to approach for any casual browser, as well as in-depth and informative for more scholarly pursuits. We’ve been constantly jotting down new web-based tools and challenging our website designer to figure out how to implement them into the framework.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the art inspection room we are continuing to make digital images of the collection as we acquire new objects, and creating new images of works already in the collection. Many of the pieces have been documented in the past, but we’re combing through and seeing which would benefit from new digital camera capabilities, multiple views, or other techniques. Mostly though, our contracted photographers have been documenting new pieces, including several sculptures from the recent Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection gift.