The BBC's Your Paintings: Networking the Art World through Digital Media

Wow!  Way to go UK information scientists, librarians, art historians and art curators.  Via a partnership between the UK's Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, over 212 thousand oil paintings in the UK have been digitized and released to the public--including one of my most favorite artists, Lucian Freud (a wonderful picture of his is shown below).

The project is called YOUR PAINTINGS


What is interesting about this project, from a complex network perspective, is that Your Paintings is asking the general public, in a sort of Wikipedia fashion, to tag pictures.  As they explain on the website: 

Your Paintings Tagger is part of a project run by the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC to put all 200,000 publicly owned oil paintings online on the Your Paintings website. Currently we have only basic information about each painting such as title, artist, and execution date. We have no information about the type of painting, the subjects portrayed in the paintings and the styles and movements represented. Tagging each painting will provide this information enabling Your Paintings to be searched by users in a more sophisticated and helpful manner. Without this extra information it will be very difficult to search Your Paintings effectively

Anyway, it is all very interesting in terms of what all of this means (good and bad) for the future of art and art venues.   Check it out...