The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, in collaboration with FIU’s Academic Imaging Services, has decided to digitize past Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts exhibition catalogs. The Frost Art Museum will soon provide digital access to these catalogs so that the public can view the rich history of our students’ work.
With the help of the high-quality scanner Quartz A0HD, Miguel Asencio, Digital Imaging Specialist and Rhia Jones, Digital Specialist at Academic Imaging Services have started on the project. The goal is to provide an online archive of these catalogs from student exhibitions. The age of the catalogs goes as far back as the late ’70s, when the University and the Department were in their infancy.
Asencio showed FIU Art + Art History how the Quartz A0HD works. The scanner can produce an archival /preservation quality high-resolution image of up to 1,000 by 1,000 dpi (dots per inch) optical of full size A0 (33″x46”) objects, and it works in less than a minute. An object is placed on a flatbed, which can handle objects up to 34.2 inches long by 49 inches wide. On a connected computer, the individual requests for the Quartz A0HD to scan the object. In no time, a high-quality / high-resolution image is available on the computer’s disk space.
Alexander Garcia, Digital Archivist at the Frost Art Museum, is leading the efforts to make the student catalogs available virtually. Garcia said that the scanning of the BFA and MFA catalogs is happening concurrently with the digitization of the Betty Laird Perry Student Art Collection at the Frost. According to him, the “project is part of a larger goal to have the museum’s permanent collection and archives digitized and accessible to the university community.”