Artists' Books Online: From Prototype to Distributed Community

FAIN: HD-50051-07

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Johanna Drucker (Project Director: November 2006 to December 2008)

The testing and implementation of a prototype for digitizing artists' books by a group of curators, artists, critics, and scholars who will expand the use and population of this virtual resource through a distributed content model.

Artists' books are original works of art produced in traditional and experimental formats. An increasing number of scholars are taking an interest in this field. But critical scholarship depends on having access to these works - many of which are rare, out-of-print, and difficult to locate. Artists' Books Online is a networked digital resource designed to provide access to these books in virtual facsimile as page images accompanied by extensive metadata in a form that creates substantial commentary. The infrastructure of the ABsOnline prototype has been designed to aggregate materials that are geographically dispersed into a single "collection" of online objects. NEH funded activity would test a model of "distributed content development" for the repository. By working with a handful of selected collaborators, I will test the viability of building a community of contributors and scaling this prototype of collaborative, online scholarship.