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The Albright-Knox Art Gallery's Digital Initiative
Through generous grants from The John R. Oishei Foundation, HSBC Bank USA, an anonymous donor, and Verizon, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery has implemented several projects, which allow online access to many of the Gallery's resources. Virtual visitors are now able to view archival material from the Gallery's 139-year history; images and information from the permanent collection; and the catalog of the G. Robert Strauss, Jr. Memorial Library. With the help of financial support from HSBC Bank USA, the Gallery is also launching artgames, an educational website about art and artists. In addition to its own sites, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is proud to be a founding member of the AMICO digital library.
These projects continue the Gallery's long-range plan to extend access to its resources to as many local, national, and international communities as possible.
Click on one of the links below to learn more.
AMICO | Collection Management | Archives | Library | Artgames | ARTStart Art Index
The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) is a not-for-profit association
of art collecting institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American
Art, SFMOMA, the Getty Museum, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Through
AMICO, these and other institutions provide access to digital documentation
of their collections for educational use. Their digital library is available
to universities and colleges, public libraries, and elementary, middle,
and high schools, and the 2001 edition includes more than 65,000 different
works of art, from prehistoric goddess figures to contemporary sculpture.
These works are fully documented, and all entries include basic cataloging
information and may also include curatorial texts, detailed provenance
information, multiple views of the work itself and other related multimedia.
AMICO's web-based interface is only accessible to individual members and educational subscribers, such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the University of Buffalo, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. The AMICO subscriber interface is available to patrons at both public access terminals in the Gallery's G. Robert Strauss, Jr. Memorial Library, while the public interface, which can be viewed by anyone with access to the web, contains a database of thumbnail images and requires a browser with JavaScript 1.1 or higher (Netscape 4.06 or Internet Explorer 4.01 are recommended).
For larger images from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's permanent collection, visit our Collection Highlights section of our website.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has strengthened its commitment to the academic community by making its permanent collection available online. Using an interface designed by Choice One OnLine and Willoughby's Multi MIMSY 2000 museum automation system, the Gallery's website now provides virtual visitors with numerous details about works in the collection, including thumbnail images of each work and information about its inclusion in exhibitions and publications. Begin your search by clicking here.
Through a generous grant from The John R. Oishei Foundation, the Gallery
has completed a multi-year project to digitize portions of its archival
collections. As part of its commitment to make these images available
to scholars everywhere, the Albright-Knox has begun to publish them online.
Digital images of important historical material from the early history
of the Gallery can be searched and reviewed here.
This site contains letters, minutes, and catalogues from the Gallery's
extensive archives prior to 1925.
Academy Notes, an annual gallery publication from 1905 to 1931,
provides readers with detailed historical information about the Albright-Knox
Art Gallery. Each page of each book has been digitized and processed
to make the text searchable. The pages are presented in both HTML and
PDF file format. The HTML version consists of images from the books which
are searchable; however, pages can only be printed one at a time, and
the images are of a lower resolution than those in PDF format. Pages
may be as large as 200K, so users with slower connections may experience
difficulty. Click here for Academy
Notes in HTML format.
Viewing the PDF format requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 4
or higher), available from Adobe.
These files offer a higher quality image with search capabilities and
a hypertext index and image list. They also allow for the printing of
consecutive pages. These files can be as large as 50 megs, which may
make them unavailable to users without high speed Internet connections.
Click here for Academy
Notes in PDF format.
Original copies of Academy Notes are available for review in
the G. Robert Strauss,
Jr. Memorial Library, located in the Gallery's Clifton Hall, and
an article about the digitization of the gallery's archives.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Library first opened its doors in 1933. In 1992, the Library moved from the main building to Clifton Hall and was named the G. Robert Strauss, Jr. Memorial Library. Its mission is to serve both researchers and the general public, to support the intellectual and educational life of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and to meet the research needs of the Gallery's professional staff, docents, and members.
The G. Robert Strauss, Jr. Memorial Library is an essential resource for the Gallery's art information services to the public, both in Western New York and the national and international communities. Its collection is well-rounded and impressive–with 32,000+ titles, it is larger than the libraries at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Art Institute–and the staff provides its public with a customized in-depth approach to research. The Library is happy to take requests for information via phone, fax, mail, or email, and visitors may place them in person as well. Over the past ten years, the Library has welcomed over 1,300 on-site visitors, and handled more than 500 research questions per year. As a continuation of the public access project funded by The John R. Oishei Foundation, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery has implemented, AKat, a web-based online public access catalog. Essentially functioning as an internet-accessible card catalog, this system provides wide-ranging public access to the Library's information-based collections of the museum. Current cataloging practice at the Albright-Knox not only applies nationally recognized cataloging standards, but also provides information on the locations of Gallery works in relevant publications. This information is now globally accessible through our new system. Patrons from any computer station in the world are now able to locate bibliographic information regarding the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's collection and exhibitions.
The Library's website is a twenty-four-hour, international, electronic entrance to the Gallery, providing a bibliographic database of the hidden treasures in the Library and Archives to any one at any time. What's more, the Library's Art Resource Center page provides virtual visitors with hundreds of links to library and art-related sites the world over.
In addition to making its numerous scholarly resources accessible on the web, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is also making a highly original contribution to elementary art education through artgames, an interactive educational website for children and families. Designed by the Gallery's Education Department and Oakland, California's Normal Force design team, artgames teaches users about art concepts and art history using works from the Gallery's permanent collection. The activities, which children can enjoy alone or with an adult, are designed for users from ages four to twelve and feature instructions in English and Spanish. This site is made possible with the help of generous financial contributions from HSBC Bank USA. Click here to play!