The Royal Society of Tasmania recently received a grant from the National Library of Australia towards the purchase of museum/gallery standard cataloguing software for the RST Art Collection.
This software program will allow the RST Art Collection to become available online for everybody to see. The catalogue will be an incredible asset for the Society, and to people interested in Tasmanian art, history and culture.
Marley Large and RST Art Curator, Dr Anita Hansen, have been learning how to use the program (eHive) and are now looking for a group of volunteers interested in helping to upload data onto the site. Volunteers will receive training and the use of an online user’s manual.
Uploading the data can be done at home, using your own computer, whenever suits you. It will be up to you how much time you wish to put into the project, which is planned to start in the new year. It will be a great opportunity to support the Society in a venture that will bring it international exposure.
This project will be long-term. There are approximately 950 artworks, each with about 20 pieces of information to upload, so the project will be time-consuming. At the moment, it takes approximately one hour to upload the data for each artwork – and that is just the basic information.
As we progress, the site will be populated with the information on the history and provenance of the artworks that Marley and Anita have worked very hard on for the past three years. It will become an invaluable tool for scholars and researchers.
If you are interested in helping with this exciting project, please contact Anita at anita.hansen@utas.edu.au, to arrange to meet and discuss the project with you.
