Project Development March 2003

Ion Mincu, Lahovary House, 1886 © Juliet Kinchin, Glasgow, 2003

Brought together by the GLAADH Conference in November 2001, staff at the three universities decided to pool their considerable expertise in Central European art and design history, to provide a new taught course and teaching and learning resource for students at the universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Glasgow. From the outset, this collaborative project has been designed around two objectives: to pull together the personal resources collected by each of the consortium members and create a databank of images and information that will form core teaching and learning materials; and secondly to provide a team taught course based on the database resource and, structured around rotating visiting lectures by members of the consortium at the three institutions.

In February 2003 the new course began at the Universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews and the web-based visual resource was launched. The latter is hosted at Glasgow University by The Humanities Advanced Technology Information Institute (HATII), which also provided vital assistance in the development of a customised programme. The website consists of a database of images with textual information and the facility for students to group images and write essays about them which can be read by staff as soon as they are submitted. Staff are able to add and delete images and text as well as edit entries and add links to bibliographies. They are also able to view the students' essays and respond by email. The resource is not yet complete; some 250 of the estimated 1000 images have been uploaded with captions, but images that will be used in the first part of the course have been prioritised and uploaded first to enable effective teaching.

So far, consortium members have been favourably impressed by the quality, and ease, of use and maintenance of the resource. Although it is too early to fully measure student feedback and evaluate the project in full, and aspects of the project are not yet complete, key factors that have contributed to the success of the project, thus far, can be identified:

Working as a consortium has brought considerable advantages, most obviously, the capability to teach a course that had previously been impracticable at certain institutions due to lack of resources and locus of specialists. But other advantages have also shown themselves, such as the ability to share the administration of the project between a number of individuals; some were closely involved in the development of the database, others have been a driving force and motivational force, while others have taken on the job of uploading images and information.

The move to identify and draw on local resources in the planning stage and build these into the project has also proved time efficient and cost effective. For example, utilising the skills of a former MA student at Glasgow University to modify an exiting database to the needs of the project, and drawing on the expertise of HATII, considerably reduced costs and time expended in comparison to developing a resource from scratch. The project also benefited from being able to access server space and general technical support through HATII, which can prove problematic for web-sites involving multiple user groups and large numbers of images.

Careful planning and the development of a detailed brief in conjunction with the database and web site designer which set out the priorities of the project, user groups and user needs, search requirements and metadata guidelines, also kept the project on track. This enabled the project members to concentrate on organising their visual and textual material while the designer developed the database and web site.

Conceiving of, and structuring the course and visual resource as one has also ensured that the resource fits the needs of the staff and students, although supporting material such as books had to be acquired by the departmental libraries. However, the team has had the support of their departments and funding has been made available within the department for these resources. Having a web-based teaching resource also means that staff can move towards power-point presentations and away from slide projections, and can access their material anywhere in the world. Similarly, students can also access visual material from anywhere, creating less pressure on slide libraries and enabling students to work from home.

As with all projects, there have been some unforeseen (and unavoidable) problems. Access to department equipment and technology is crucial to a project like this. The lack of slide scanners has increased the cost of the project and it has proved time consuming to outsource and convert slides to digital images. Uploading the images and caption information has also taken longer than anticipated and all members of the consortium have contributed a considerable amount of their own time to the project. Finally, managing and juggling the teaching schedules of four academics at three institutions so that they can provide visiting lectures within the same term has also proved problematic and requires careful and long term planning.

The team has been fortunate in working with a database and website designer who has been so personally committed to the project, and is prepared to go on assisting with any technical teething troubles. Both students and staff are excited by the new course and visual resource and feedback from students at Aberdeen who took the new course in term two (Jan - March 2003) was generally very positive. Students were particularly positive about the facility to group images in photo albums which they can refer to for their research. Students also found that the more simple search options were the most useful. In light of students feedback, students essays have also been made available to each other on the website for consultation. Negative comments tended to focus on technical problems relating to submitting essays, and these problems are in the process of being resolved. On the whole, students found that they had the technical skills to be able to use the web-based resource relatively easily. New students to the course are automatically sent an email explaining how to use the resource and all Art History students have to take web CT courses each year, so they should have good level of computer literacy before starting the course.

Pulling together their resources onto one web-based site has enabled Shona Kallestrup at Aberdeen to teach a course that would not previously have been practicable. Jeremy Howard at St Andrews has also been able to incorporate Romanian and Hungarian art into his existing course, which he could not do previously. Similarly, Paul Stirton and Juliet Kinchin at Glasgow will also profit from the increased breadth of resources which will make possible the introduction of a new course on Eastern European art and design. One final and unintended outcome of the project is that the presentation of so many new and unpublished images and wealth of fresh information will no doubt spark off new ideas and research by both the consortium members and students.

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