Urban Archives

This week, I looked at www.urbanarchives.org, a collection of photographs of art in public spaces, such as graffiti, yard art, and signage, compiled by students at the University of Washington with the goal of encouraging the study of communication in public spaces.

Selection Decisions: It’s difficult to tell what decisions were made when selecting the images to be displayed on the website. This project began in 2004, and these images were all produced for this project, so I might assume that all of these images were born digital, captured on digital cameras and loaded directly onto this Web site. I might guess that the faculty members in charge of this project have selected which photos to display based on the usefulness of the images to their mission of studying communication in public spaces.

Metadata: Data about the images is very well supplied on this site, which is integrated into the University of Washington library system digital collections database structure. For each image, the site provides a title, date, time, description, location, item number, format, photographer, copyright holder, and collection and series names. Seeing as these images were born digital for the building of a specific collection, metadata like this can be very thorough. Unfortunately (and surprisingly), technical metadata is missing from this collection where I’m sure such information should be available. I might attribute this to the existing structure of the UW libraries site.

Digital Object Characteristics: The photos in this collection are all very high quality. However, the structure of the UW libraries’ “Contentdm” database limits the amount of enlargement that the user is able to do. If someone were interested in studying the intense details of a specific piece of graffiti art, for example, this site does not allow for the best possible quality. I would say that this negates the mission of the Urban Archive to make urban art from all over the world available for study. These images don’t allow quite enough depth.

Intended Audience: The goal of the Urban Archive is to make worldwide urban art and communication available for study anywhere in the world. Therefore, the intended audience would be anyone with interests in studying these media of art and communication.