KATHY EARNHART | The Butler Institute Museum unveils digital archive

What do you get when you combine 87 years of historical information, 10,000 public domain images, 17,000 individual works of art, 30,000 documents, two dedicated museum archivists, one New England Web designer and a New York City educational foundation?
Add to the mix three years of intensive labor, university interns and a lot of "constructive" criticism.
Your answer might be Google or even the Library of Congress. At The Butler Institute of American Art, there is only one answer -- it's the museum's newly unveiled Henry Luce Archive of American Art.
Online, the project may be viewed as www.butlermuseum.org -- and at the Butler in Youngstown, the archive can be seen on touch-screen kiosks placed with the museum's collection galleries.
When it began
This labor-intensive project of creating a digital archive of the Butler's vast collection and accompanying materials was initiated by 10 years ago by the museum's director Dr. Lou Zona. Funded early on through the generosity of the late Paul Mesaros, a longtime Butler trustee, the effort was fraught with many technological obstacles. Better scanners, better cameras, bigger computer hard drives, faster Internet connections -- all challenges were met during the long journey leading to the project's completion.
In 2003, upon receipt of additional funding from the Henry Luce Foundation of New York City, the Butler's archive project took on the energy of an all-out assault. Butler collection archive materials, beginning with antique documents carefully preserved from before 1900, were organized. Correspondence that referenced works from the original collection of Joseph G. Butler Jr., papers and plans detailing the building of the Institute before its 1919 opening, as well as the many additions and building restorations, were electronically cataloged.
The provenance (or exhibition history) of many of the holdings, including paintings acquired early on by Butler, were detailed in individual computer records. The evolution of the beginning of this small, all-American museum from 300 works to its present day world-class status and vast holdings of more than 20,000 individual works was painstakingly chronicled for the Butler's electronic archive.
With the involvement of the Luce Foundation, an organization devoted to American visual arts history and education, founded by the late Time and Life magazine publishing tycoon, the digital archiving of the Butler collection moved into fast-forward mode.
Growing each day
The Butler Institute of American Art's Henry Luce Foundation Collection Database, now complete, is a living entity that grows daily as it is updated regularly by its on-site "parents," Butler Registrar Rebecca Davis and the Institute's secret weapon -- Electronic Archivist Patrick McCormick.
The Web address www.butlermuseum.org is the access for the Henry Luce database Web site, which links to the Institute's information or "sibling" Web site, www.butlerart.com.
The new Butler archival Web link was designed in cooperation with Tom Joseph, Sue Carter and Tom Merideth of Fairhaven Software of Massachusetts, experts in the field of archiving museum collections. But it was the dedication of Davis and McCormick, along with time contributed by Butler staff, university museum studies interns and many Butler volunteers, that made the project a reality.
Countless hours were devoted to the scanning and photographing of hundreds of thousands of pieces of material that make up this extensive record. The searchable database contains images and information on approximately 19,000 works -- paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and photographs from the Butler Institute's collection.
Also included
Records are displayed and may be searched by artists' names, titles of the works, media, sizes, etc. Artists' biographies, photographic portraits and historic correspondence with Butler curators are also included on the site. Restoration of works -- complete with before and after photographs -- offers insight into methods of conservation/preservation of works of fine art.
For historians, the archive is invaluable. For students, it is an amazing resource. For art lovers, it's just plain fascination and fun. Letters from U.S. presidents, correspondence that lends insight to a bygone era, photographs from the beginning of photography itself, and more can be found within this archive that is as much a history of America as it is a history of American art.
A unique feature of the Butler archival site is the link to Request-a-Print. This service, soon to be national, was designed by Rudinec & amp; Associates of Boardman. The link offers reproductions of noncopywritten Butler images to the public for a nominal fee. A portion of the Request-a-Print fee is donated to the Butler's paintings conservation/restoration fund.