Digital Archives: Tate Archive Puts Thousand Of Artists’ Artifacts Online
Recently released online.
From The Guardian:
About 52,000 photographs, letters, sketchbooks and technical records offering insights into some of Britain’s greatest 20th-century artists are to be put online for the first time.
Tate Archive has announced details of the first tranche of material, which anyone, anywhere can access freely. It includes the love letters of painter Paul Nash, the detailed sculpture records of Barbara Hepworth, and 3,000 photographs by Nigel Henderson, providing a behind-the-scenes backstage look at London’s 1950s jazz scene.
“We’ve been a hidden treasure for too long really,” said the archive’s head, Adrian Glew, on Tuesday. “It is a national archival treasure, but it is for the enrichment of the whole world; we’d like it to reach as wide an audience as we can.
From The Tate:
This is the first stage of the project with the publication of 6,000 items online, including 15 collections relating to Kenneth Armitage, Anita Bartle, Jacob Epstein, Stephen Gilbert, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Nigel Henderson, Barbara Hepworth, Josef Herman, David Jones, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Ethel Sands, Graham Sutherland, Henry Scott Tuke and Keith Vaughan. The digitisation of archives relating to a further 37 artists will be completed in summer 2015, including Eileen Agar, Prunella Clough and Kurt Schwitters.
As part of opening up access to the Archive, Tate has developed new ways of engaging with these historic materials. This includes an online ‘Albums’ feature which allows visitors to group together archive items and artworks that they can add to, annotate and share, a series of films exploring all aspects of the project, and a learning programme across the UK working in partnership with key art organisations. Tate will be the first fine arts organisation to collaborate with the Zooniverse team led by the University of Oxford to crowdsource full text transcriptions of handwritten documents.
Search
Direct to New Digital Archive
Direct to “Art Search” From The Tate
See Also: Learn About the ‘Albums’ Feature Mentioned Above
See Also: Learn About the Use of Metadata by Tate Archive
Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, News

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.