About the Project

accessCeramics is a growing collection of images of contemporary ceramics by recognized artists. It is designed for use by artists, arts educators, scholars and the general public, and is intended to fill a void in contemporary ceramics digital image collections on the web. The images and metadata are held within the Flickr photo sharing system, and accessible through this website as well as the Flickr interface. Submissions are juried by a curatorial board, which currently consists of the founders of the Collection, Ted Vogel (Assistant Professor of Art, Program Head in Ceramics, Department of Art, Lewis & Clark College) and Margo Ballantyne (Visual Resources Curator, Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College). The curatorial board will be expanded in the future.

accessCeramics merges a traditional academic digital image collection's metadata capabilities with Flickr's openness and flexibility. It seeks to take advantage of Flickr's software tools and social network while also providing a web interface customized to this collection. We expect that individuals will encounter the collection through our website and through the Flickr interface, in a spirit similar to the Library of Congress photo collection in the Flickr Commons. We hope the Collection will serve as a model for future image collections in the arts and humanities.

In phase one of the project, we are focusing upon building the collection with our cataloging/submission interface. In phase two, we will develop features to help artists, educators, and collectors use the collection.

It is a pilot project organized by the Visual Resources Collection of Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College. Please contact Margo Ballantyne for more information (margo@lclark.edu).