Abstract

Founded in 1980, Artexte is a not-for-profit organization with a mandate to support the advancement of the visual arts through reliable information sources. Artexte engages in research, interpretation and dissemination activities based on its unique collection of bibliographic materials, covering the visual arts from 1965 to the present, with emphasis on the art of Quebec and Canada.

This year, Artexte launched e-artexte (http://e-artexte.ca), a unique open access digital repository for documents in the visual arts. The e-artexte self-archiving repository caters to the needs of museums, galleries, artist-run centers and other publishers/authors in the visual arts community who are looking to make their publications more widely accessible via the Internet. Open access is a founding principle of the e-artexte service.

The e-artexte repository is the result of research, development and design that took place over the last three years. This demonstration will present the results of a metadata migration and software customizations for providing access to Artexte bibliographic data using the EPrints (http://www.eprints.org) open source digital repository software. The e-artexte interface and policies will be demonstrated. The demonstration will provide an overview of the e-artexte service and its self-archiving functionality.

The open source EPrints platform that powers e-artexte is highly interoperable, allowing for the export and harvesting of its collection by researchers and aggregating software. In choosing open source technology that is capable of export of e-artexte contents using semantic web standards, a necessary condition for innovation is met. e-artexte enables researchers to leverage the open metadata exporting capabilities of the EPrints software to create specialized interfaces. An example of such visualization will also be demonstrated:

Timeline Visualization: Photography Exhibition Catalogues in Artexte Collection (1960-2012). PhotographyMedia.com http://www.photographymedia.com/visualizations/artexte/e-artexte-1.html

This example demonstrates how e-artexte metadata can be visualized using the SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) widgets originally developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technologies) Libraries and CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory).