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Rise of the Dead: Iconclass is back with Arkyves

Submitted by Georg on Mon, 2008-12-08 20:29
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After long time of trouble and a flying splice of the institution in charge the subject-specific classification system IconClass seems to see the sunlight again in a new project. In a special Christmas edition of the Culture Geeks’ talk at Brighton, Etienne Posthumus will give a talk about "Enabling Multilingual Subject Access to Collections". It's all about a new portal called Arkyves. The persons behind Arkyves are well-knowned by their joint venture Mnemosyne that was close connected to IconClass in last years. Arkyves seems to offer a service that is already provided via the libertas browser of IconClass. If you klick on a notation, in the bottom left corner of the screen you can access various online collections that are categorized using IconClass. Arkyves offers the same functionality with a slicker UI and different collections:
  • Illuminated Manuscripts from KB and MMW
  • Den Haag - Netherlands
  • French Emblems at Glasgow University Library, United Kingdom
  • Emblem Project Utrecht -Netherlands
  • Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes, Tours - France
  • Festbücher in the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel - Germany
  • Progetto Marengo - Caricature and Satire (1848 - 1940), Milan - Italy
Plus some additional Mnemosyne collections. It's an useful approach to access online collection of cultural heritage, but this portal wants your money. Read the brochure to notice that you have to pay 1000,- Euro for a institutional licence, 200 Euro,- for a individual licence (per year or 25 Euro per month) or 10 Euro for a 24 hours pass. At the end it's all about the money. Arkyves is also a OAI-PMH conformant Harvester, so they want you data too. I would rather have a OAI-PMH conformant, non-commercial IconClass Provider for academic use and research. P.S.: There is a new(?) IconClass-Browser available under http://www.iconclass.org/browse.

Comments

Hope to see you on the 17th.

Submitted by Etienne Posthumus (not verified) on Wed, 2008-12-10 22:30.
Hope to see you on the 17th. Tried to find some background info on this blog, so I am just guessing that you are based in Brighton, but for all that I know you might live around the world of course. Hopefully I will be able to make the point more clearly that the whole idea for Arkyves is that you use it as a ICONCLASS provider at no cost. The only reason we 'wants your money' is to subscribe to the entire Arkyves database, which is more than just a sum of its parts. Of course we would also love for it to be free for all, that would make it much more popular and widely known. But how to fund such a beastie? Ad revenue sure won't do the trick. If you have any suggestions for business models or giant subsidies please don't hesitate to suggest them. The browser you mention at http://www.iconclass.org/browse was also made by me (and the running costs sponsored by us). It provides a much better search facility than Libertas which has been getting very long in the tooth. The next step is to integrate some of the links to third party databases there too, and to add some images to answer the question we hear so often: "But where are the pictures?"... ;-) Looking forward to comments, regards Etienne

Sorry for the lack of

Submitted by Georg on Sun, 2008-12-21 12:21.
Sorry for the lack of background information about me in this blog. I will add it soon when I got more convenient with drupal. That's also the cause of my delayed answer, I simply did not mention your comment. I would have liked to attend to your speech, but I'm not located in Brighton, I'm from germany. You say "the whole idea for Arkyves is that you use it as a ICONCLASS provider at no cost" but how is it supposed to provide iconclass data? Is there any api or webservice I have overseen? My remark about the money maybe to harsh. Of course I know that everything costs money, and I appreciate your effort to breath new live in iconclass. My ideal idea would be that iconclass itself (not your product) should be made free to the (art history) community by the netherland government or the EU. Ok, I'm dreaming ... And the question about "where are the images" I knew only too well. I'm related to prometheus, and yes, we want your money too! Sitting in a glass house ... :-)

Very good post, thanks a lot.

Submitted by dido (not verified) on Fri, 2009-12-11 18:56.
Very good post, thanks a lot.

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