JISC

See the collection

Birmingham Museums and ArtGallery (BM&AG) has a large and important holding of Pre-Raphaelite drawings which has never before been comprehensively documented and accessed as a collection. It includes work by the renowned artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and Edward Burne Jones, among others. With the digitisation of these works, this project will create a unique research source for the study of the Pre- Raphaelites and British 19th-century art. It will be available open access to all users via the BirminghamMuseums and ArtGallery website.

The project

Pre-Raphaelitism was Britain’s most significant and influential 19th-century art movement. Founded in 1848, it centred on a group of three young artists: William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. These artists sought to revive English art by radically turning away from the old studio tradition and bringing painting into direct contact with nature. With an eye for absolute accuracy, every detail was now to have intense realist as well as symbolic meaning. Literary subjects, landscape and modern-life and medieval scenes were just some of the themes promoted by the Pre-Raphaelites and their extensive number of associates during the 1850s.

BM&AG’s collection is unique in representing each phase of the movement in depth. The range of work spans painting on canvas, works on paper, sculpture, designs for stained glass, textiles, and tiles, as well as printed books.

The creation of a Pre-Raphaelite online resource allows for both an extraordinary overview and an in-depth analysis of the subject area by crossing media boundaries and collating new visual and metadata material. The project will provide unique links to artists and art works that might not have been discovered previously, and will allow users to go into further points of study and enquiry. It will also provide the education community with images relevant to their needs, easy to find, easy to use and customisable.

The content

The project will digitise BM&AG’s entire Pre-Raphaelite collection, including painting on canvas, works on paper, sculpture, designs for stained glass, textiles, tiles, printed books, unpublished artists’ and associates’ letters, notebooks relating to major patrons of the BM&AG collection, and associated photographic material.

It will create over 3,000 files with new metadata and over 3,000 high quality images.

The process

The proposed selection of artists and scope of material reflects the strength of the BM&AG collection. The BM&AG’s curators have an extensive knowledge of the collections which will contribute to making this an information-rich resource. At the same time, an advisory group of academics is on hand to support and strengthen the digitisation project. Membership is drawn from throughout the UK as well as Birmingham, with the aims of: helping to scope the project; monitoring and contributing to the development of the resource site; advising on the application of a controlled vocabulary; interpreting the material under thematic/ modular headings as teaching and research tools; and helping to ensure sustainability.

There will be a strong focus on producing good metadata for the images, information and the educational resources as it is essential that they can be easily found and used.

The future

The Pre-Raphaelite collection will be fully accessible to the education community. The general public will also have access to the site but the intended audience is students, lecturers, historians, researchers, librarians and other members of the education community. The website will offer teaching exemplars, and this may be expanded in the future as users of content will be encouraged to share what they produce with other people online.

The resource will also experiment with offering users the opportunity to “self-tag” images with their own key words in the way that has been popularised on websites such as Flickr and YouTube. This will allow people who have used an image or images in a different way or in a different subject area than was envisaged to flag this up to other users. This has the potential to encourage both a greater and a wider use of the resource.

Download the project plan

Download the final report