Pre-Raphaelite resource site
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This project digitised the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite collection and created a Pre-Raphaelite online resource that is fully accessible to the education community.
Executive Summary
The primary audience for the website was defined as students, lecturers, historians, art librarians and other members of the education community. The general public are a secondary audience.
Images on the website can be used freely for educational purposes by schools and further and higher education, but they cannot be used freely or without permission for commercial purposes.
Audience Research was commissioned for this project to inform the development of the online resource for the education community. The main concern of students and lecturers was to access reliable, relevant content and information. One of the most important lessons to come from this project is the importance of undertaking audience research to find out what users want.
The management of the project was undertaken by core museum staff and broken down into work packages and areas of responsibility.
It has been advantageous to the project to be able to build on previous and current work by Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery related to the Pre-Raphaelite collection and the existing partnership with the University of Birmingham.
Images and metadata created as part of the project will be managed and preserved for the future as part of the core work of Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery to document museum objects and preserve electronic records.
Photography standards and digital preservation of images that have been developed as part of the project have been adopted by Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
The knowledge, skills and experience gained by staff are added value for Birmingham Museums & Gallery and can be carried forward to future projects.
High resolution images created for the project are generating income from Picture Library clients who wish to licence the images for use in commercial publications. It is anticipated that this revenue stream increase will increase. This will help to guarantee sustainability and create support for future digitisation projects.