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The Society of Architectural Historians Online Image Archive: Transforming the Field of Architectural History through Collaboration

Ann Whiteside
Head, Rotch Library of Architecture & Planning and Project Director
SAH Architecture Resources Archive
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Pauline Saliga
Executive Director
Society of Architectural Historians and
Charnley-Persky House Museum Foundation
Carole Ann Fabian
Director of Planning, Outreach and Communications
ARTstor

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has received funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a dynamic online visual resources library for scholars in the fields of architectural history, landscape and cultural landscape studies, historic preservation and other fields related to the built environment. Named the SAH Architectural Resources Archive (SAHARA), the project is a collaborative effort among SAH, scholars of architectural history, librarians and libraries (initially Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Virginia), and ARTstor to develop an online library of hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of still and dynamic images of architecture for research and teaching.

SAHARA will substantially change and improve the way the history, the present and future of the built environment are taught and understood. Instead of developing separate, independent collections of architectural images for each institution, librarians will contribute images and metadata to SAHARA, a shared resource that will be widely available. The images will come from scholars’ own collections that have been taken for research and pedagogical purposes. The metadata will be provided by scholars in consultation with librarians and visual resources experts. The expectation for developing SAHARA is that scholars, librarians, and institutional leadership will join together to create a shared online resource that will both enrich the field of architectural history and create a new collaborative work model for scholars and visual resources and art/architecture libraries.

CNI meeting participants are encouraged to share their expertise in collaborative initiatives and thoughts on processes for the engagement of scholars and librarians in transformative change.

http://www.sah.org
http://www.sah.org/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=AVRN&category=Main

Handout (MS WORD)

Last updated:  Monday, February 25th, 2013