The National pixel collection

If you go to Te Papa’s blog you'll see the Rights Manager has put up a link to the most recent art works to have had their images digitised and put into the online catalogue. It's good to see (thanks Victoria), but what does this snapshot tell us? Well, not a lot. Apart from a brief introduction, there’s no info on how works are selected for the digitising programme, how far it has progressed and what’s likely to be done next. It feels like a missed opportunity to get some user participation into priorities. For instance we noticed that there are 19 works by Milan Mrkusich in the collection and only one of them has been digitised. Let’s fix that first. What was the rush to digitise more Nigel Browns (there are already five on the website), more John Drawbridge works (seven works are already reproduced) and a George Kojis ceramic? There must be some method to it, but it is hard to think what it might be.