About the Electronic Exhibition Catalog

This exhibition catalog was prepared in conjunction with the November 1993 Symposium, "Scholarly Publishing and the Electronic Networks," sponsored by the Association of American University Presses and the Association of Research Libraries.

With the appearance of Mosaic as a client, the WorldWideWeb has become a dynamic and functional medium for electronic publishing. This catalog was intended to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Web as a platform for publishing exhibition records which would otherwise go unpublished.

The University of Virginia's Bayly Museum routinely mounts small exhibits from its permanent collection which are undocumented except by explanatory labels which accompany the objects in the exhibit. This electronic exhibition catalog was based on that existing ASCII text, prepared at the time of the show, and incorporates images scanned from slides of the objects made when the show was mounted. Thus a publication and valuable record of the exhibit's content can be produced with minimal added effort and expense.

The steps in producing the catalog were:

1. making basic organizational decisions on how to present the existing text,
2. adding HTML markup to the ASCII text supplied by the Museum,
3. scanning the images, creating JPEG and GIF image files and appropriate links,
4. testing and fine tuning.

The images were scanned in a Nikon LS3510 Slide Scanner at 200 dpi output resolution (scan pitch 3) and color corrected and retouched using Adobe PhotoShop. The original files were then cropped and converted to the JPEG format, for the larger format 24- bit images, and to GIFs for the inlined images. The original files average between 2 and 3 MB before compression. The JPEG compression was done at the PhotoShop "very good" quality setting. This compression setting is virtually lossless (no visible data loss), but makes the image files small enough to permit network transmission within acceptable limits. The compressed images range between 100 and 220k in size. The original retouched images were then converted from 24-bit to 8-bit color and were cropped to a standard vertical dimension of 200 pixels for placement as inlined images linked to the larger JPEGs.

The electronic exhibition catalog was prepared by:

Questions should be directed to her at cds2e@virginia.edu.

Click here for Credits

Click here to return to the title page.