Collection Synergy: Making a Scholar-Photographer's Legacy Images More Widely Available in a Digital Environment

  • Allan T. Kohl Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Keywords: architectural photography, postcards, copyright, public domain

Abstract

A two-year project originally focused on digitizing a retiring faculty member’s original location slides of Midwestern architecture expanded its scope to include the professor’s collection of historic picture postcards documenting the same structures. Assessment of the copyright status of the postcards showed them all to be in the public domain, and hence shareable. A final component of the project was to add embedded metadata to the digital images documenting these photographs and postcards.

Author Biography

Allan T. Kohl, Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Art historian Allan T. Kohl is the Visual Resources Librarian at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and also teaches special topics art and cultural history courses for the College of Continuing Education at the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities. He did his graduate study in Library/Information Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in art history at the University of Minnesota. He is Past-President, and current Treasurer, of the Visual Resources Association, and has served for more than a decade on the VRA's Intellectual Property Rights Committee, with a particular interest in copyright issues as these affect the educational use of images documenting works of art and visual culture.

Published
2020-02-18
Issue
Vol. 40 No. 2 (2013): Moving Towards Openness: Cooperations in Image Collections
Section
Feature Articles

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