British Printed Images
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The core of this project will be an online library of over 10,000 printed images from early modern Britain. Most of these will come from the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. These will be complemented by items from other collections, notably the Victoria and Albert Museum. The fully searchable database will be available late in 2008.
Images will be able to be located by artist, person, place and date. There will also be a systematically organised thesaurus enabling users to search for images by subject or theme. This resource will be comparable to such databases as the Tate Gallery’s Insight. As far as possible, it will be compatible with ICONCLASS. Click here for further information.
Work is currently in progress on the thesaurus and search mechanism. It is important that the design reflects the needs of users as far as possible. If you are interested in the resource and would like to help us plan it, we would very much welcome your input. Enquiries from schools would be particularly welcome.
The project is funded by a three year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under their Resource Enhancement Scheme. The project is led by Birkbeck, University of London, with the collaboration of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (King’s College London). The project team comprises Michael Hunter, Katherine Hunt and Stephen Pigney from Birkbeck and Harold Short, Martyn Jessop, John Bradley, Hafed Walda, Paul Vetch, Elena Pierazzo and Gerhard Brey from King’s.