The Davison Art Center (DAC) at Wesleyan University in Connecticut (United States) holds more than 25,000 works on paper, chiefly prints and photographs. The DAC collection serves teaching, study, research, exhibition, and other educational purposes. This includes public sharing of high-resolution images of collection objects which are themselves free of copyright. These images have been provided in growing numbers since 2012 as DAC Open Access Images, which may be freely discovered and downloaded via DAC Collection Search.
DAC Collection Search offers text-based catalog records for nearly the entire collection, along with (to date) 4,590 downloadable DAC Open Access Images representing most of the DAC’s European prints from the 16th through 19th centuries. High-resolution, zoomable images of those 4,590 prints also are available for viewing online. A shortcut relevant to Coding Dürer leads directly to links to all DAC Dürer holdings with images.
Each DAC Open Access Image is provided for free public download and use in two versions: a publication-quality TIFF (4,096 pixels long dimension) and a presentation-ready JPEG (1,024 pixels). A ReadMe offers technical guidance for image users. These images may be freely used under the DAC Open Access Images policy, which applies to DAC images that have no known copyright restrictions. Please see that policy for details.
DAC cataloging metadata for these images (as well as for other collection holdings) may be freely downloaded from the same DAC Collection Search pages in two forms: structured LIDO XML and a basic, human-readable text caption in English. In order to make it as useful as possible for projects working across multiple collections, this metadata is provided under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication) license.
Most of the images of British, Dutch, and German prints (and thus, the Dürer images) were made in 2015 or 2016 during the first two of three summers of grant-funded digital photography of DAC collection objects. This digitization project was made possible in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Development of DAC Collection Search is ongoing. It may be offline on occasion for updates and improvements between 5:00 and 7:00 PM Eastern time (GMT -5:00h or -4:00h, depending on season).
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