After long time of trouble and a flying splice of the institution in charge the subject-specific classification system
IconClass seems to see the sunlight again in a new project.
In a special Christmas edition of the
Culture Geeks’ talk at Brighton, Etienne Posthumus will give a talk about "
Enabling Multilingual Subject Access to Collections". It's all about a new portal called
Arkyves. The persons behind Arkyves are well-knowned by their joint venture
Mnemosyne that was close connected to IconClass in last years.
Arkyves seems to offer a service that is already provided via the
libertas browser of IconClass. If you klick on a notation, in the
bottom left corner of the screen you can access various online collections that are categorized using IconClass. Arkyves offers the same functionality with a slicker UI and
different collections:
- Illuminated Manuscripts from KB and MMW
- Den Haag - Netherlands
- French Emblems at Glasgow University Library, United Kingdom
- Emblem Project Utrecht -Netherlands
- Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes, Tours - France
- Festbücher in the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel - Germany
- Progetto Marengo - Caricature and Satire (1848 - 1940), Milan - Italy
Plus some additional
Mnemosyne collections.
It's an useful approach to access online collection of cultural heritage, but this portal wants your money. Read the
brochure to notice that you have to pay 1000,- Euro for a institutional licence, 200 Euro,- for a individual licence (per year or 25 Euro per month) or 10 Euro for a 24 hours pass. At the end it's all about the money. Arkyves is also a OAI-PMH conformant Harvester, so they want you data too. I would rather have a OAI-PMH conformant, non-commercial IconClass
Provider for academic use and research.
P.S.: There is a new(?) IconClass-Browser available under
http://www.iconclass.org/browse.
