Archives to Avery Library/ Columbia University

[SDR]

Everything I've posted is a screen grab. The best option for viewing is to use the site, expand the image to full screen (upper left on page), collapse title bar at bottom, and navigate. Many of the drawings were not photographed at high resolution, or else not transmitted to Artstor at full size . . .?

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[SDR]

Parallel discussion of the drawing archive, its revelation, format, and availability.

http://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewto ... =2&t=14287

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[Mark Hertzberg]

This is full of errors, based on two of the four things I checked. They have the Thomas P. Hardy House in Glencoe, as well as in Racine. Click on the signs for Henry Wallis in 1900 and they caption it as being for Waller. Also, one of the three is a design for a deck chair for Wallis, it is not signage.

[SDR]

Not sure if you're talking about errors in the Artstor files---but if so, you're not alone. In addition to the occasional upside-down drawing photograph, the attributions are not flawless, and files from different projects can be found mixed together. Today I consulted the group of Heurtley artifacts, and found a half-dozen photos of the Cheney house in the mix.

My study of the photographed drawings, which proceeds as I move from one project to another, reveals several disappointing facts: many drawings appear at far less than ideal resolution, many seem hastily pinned up, far from level with the camera, and in more than a few cases the camera is not directly opposite the board, resulting in images which are distorted---an easy flaw to discover as architectural drawings made on the drafting board will have reliably parallel horizontal (and vertical) lines.

All of this criticism might be characterized as "looking a gift horse in the mouth" No one is more grateful than I to have these thousands of drawings available for study. The task of mounting and shooting well over fifteen thousand pieces of paper can't have been a walk in the park. Nevertheless it is sobering to find that a once-in-a-lifetime project to record and digitize this treasure might have been rushed, or under-funded, insufficiently supervised or perhaps not carried out in a thoroughly professional fashion. Caveat emptor, in any event ?

If the task had been postponed until now, would today's scanning equipment have enabled the team to dispense with photography altogether ? Is it really too late for a second go-round ? Who would pay for such a project, and would it be easy to convince anyone that it was necessary ?

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[SDR]

Naturally it would be highly inappropriate to subject original Taliesin drawings, with their wrinkles, folds, and delicate papers, to the sort of scanner which ingests the subject between rollers. I have not seen a flat-bed scanner with a bed of, say, 30 x 40 inches; a scanner which passes the original beneath a scanner head in a touchless manner would be acceptable. Without an extensive search I came to this:

https://www.scantastik.com/hardware/wid ... 6-ART.html

A device like this would handle the vast majority of the collection. Forty thousand dollars is a bit steep. Perhaps such a device could be rented, or a facility with one of these in its inventory might be willing to sell time on it.

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[g.dorn]

A fellow FLWBC board member shared this with me:
The Avery Library has scanned and uploaded the black and white photos of many of the Wright drawings to Artstor in the Public Collections:

https://library.artstor.org/#/collection/100116947

Because of copyright, the images cannot be downloaded but they can be enlarged.

If you get lost on Artstor, go to Browse the collections and select the Public Collections.

Caution! This can be addictive...please remember to eat and use the bathroom occasionally.

Happy New Year!

I've discovered if you go to print preview, it brings up a new screen, once the image loads you can select copy image address, then paste that in a new tab, then adjust the image size in the address by changing its size ie to "size4 " = (1024 x 844), or what ever size you want - I tried size 5, 6, 7 & 8, but get invalid thumbnail size

eg

https://library.artstor.org/#/public/28516020

https://library.artstor.org/#/assetprint/28516020

gets me

https://stor.artstor.org/stor/0c2bdea8- ... 7971_size2

change to

https://stor.artstor.org/stor/0c2bdea8- ... 7971_size4

and I get this



obviously this process is just to help with study purposes, in that you can now how multiple tabs/windows with the various images open to view an compare and study