Cultural applications
Museums and art galleries are especially concerned about the quality of
reproductions, so it is no surprise that some of our most exciting and
challenging engagements have been with such institutions.
Examples
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
We worked with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,
Russia, to develop a state-of-the-art web site and Digital Library
solution. This was a joint development project which included
contributions from the State Hermitage Museum and many IBM locations,
including Armonk, NY; IBM Research, Haifa, Israel; IBM Naples, Italy;
IBM Russia, Moscow and St. Petersburg; IBM Software Solutions, Santa
Teresa, CA; and IBM Research, Hawthorne and Yorktown, NY.
The goal of this project was to capture images from the Hermitage
collection for use with in-museum kiosks, for educational purposes,
and over the web.
The
Hermitage web site
shows one of the results of this partnership.
This work was awarded
Imaging Solution of 1999 in the category
"Digital Photography and Still Image Databasing" by
Advanced Imaging Magazine.
An
IBM press release describes the project in more detail.
Klau Library of the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio
The archive collection in the Klau Library of the
Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of
Religion
in Cincinnati, Ohio contains a
number of magnificent manuscripts. In late 1995, we captured images of a
small subset of pages of several copies of the Haggadah (the narrative
of the Exodus read at the Seder during Passover) and other books dating
from the 11th to 18th centuries. Ten of these images
are available for viewing, courtesy of the Klau Library, Hebrew
Union College.
National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
The National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, together with the IBM
Digital Library, IBM Taiwan, and our group, has an on-going project to
capture images from their collection.
A few sample images are available.
The Vatican Library, Vatican City, Rome
An IBM team, including several members of our group, worked with the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the
Vatican Library as part of an IBM Digital Library project to capture
accurate images from some of the manuscripts stored at the Library.
One of the objectives of this project was to determine the technical
feasibility of using high quality digital images in place of the
original manuscripts for scholars whose access to the Vatican Library is
limited because of the cost of travel and time constraints. Some
sample
images are just a few of the 20,000 images scanned, and also
demonstrate use of a visible watermark on the Vatican Library images.
The project is described in more detail in an article
"Toward on-line, worldwide access to Vatican Library materials"
from the IBM Journal of Research and Development.
More information about the IBM Digital Library can be found at its
home page.
Lutherhalle, Wittenberg, Germany
We are currently working with the Lutherhalle Wittenberg, Germany, the
largest museum in the world dedicated to the history of the Reformation,
to capture images of a variety of objects (manuscripts, paintings,
coins) in the library's collection. Two sample
images from this collection are available for viewing. Additional
details of the project and some additional images are contained in an
article
IBM's Digital Library Preserves Luther's Legacy.
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