State Hermitage Digital Collection

The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia began a partnership with IBM in 1997 to create an online digital collection consisting of high-resolution images of artwork from throughout the museum. The digital collection consists of hundreds of searchable images of two and three-dimensional artifacts from 12 categories including sculpture, arms and armour, textiles, and paintings, prints, and drawings.

Selection Decisions
There is a good description of the partnership between IBM and the museum through a link at the bottom of the page, although it doesn’t go into any detail about their selection policies. It is difficult to determine what percentage of the collection has been digitized or even the number of images that are now online. It does appear from the categories that the images are at least a representative sampling.

Metadata
The metadata that accompanies each work is what one might expect to see in person – culture, dates, material, dimensions, and style followed by a concise description. There are some links within the description to definitions of specialized terms. The IBM search capabilities are fascinating. One can browse the collection by type of art and country of origin, conduct a quick or advanced search using more in-depth information such as genre, date, and author, or use the intriguing QGIB search. QBIC (Query by Image Content) is an experimental search system whereby someone recalling the layout or coloring of a work of art can find artwork with similar characteristics. In practice, however, the color search system is fairly awkward. I wonder how often someone can recall the percentage of various colors in a painting. The layout approach allowed me to draw a rudimentary version of what I wanted to find using only circles and boxes. The results were far from what I envisioned.

Object Characteristics
Each image has the option of two resolution settings – 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768. The zoom function only allows one to toggle between these two sizes. Although the resolution might be better, the images themselves are clear and crisp. Three-dimensional objects are sometimes represented from more than one angle.

Audience
The site is an overt advertisement for IBM’s tools and expertise. Throughout the site, IBM points out the functionality of each tool and the importance of their work. The QBIC search is still in the demo stage, and other sections suggest that IBM could do more if they had the resources or interest. There are a number of options that would be useful to researchers if they could figure out how to access them. For instance, the site promises extreme resolution for researchers to study the fine details of some of the works, but I couldn’t seem to access this option. On the whole, the site is aimed at the general public and those interested in soliciting IBM’s help in a digitization project.