VADS services this year have continued to develop whilst also contributing to AHDS strategic changes. The latter will culminate in new branding and website restructuring for the Service in the new academic year. This thus represents the final annual report for "VADS" as it moves towards becoming "AHDS Visual Arts" in 2003-04.

VADS has built on prior significant collections achievements by providing 3 new collections on-line, with a further 24 major collections in accession/negotiation. Collections are now available via extensive new systems architecture, developed through the PICTIVA project and launched in February, which greatly enhances the use of VADS image collections.
Collections and systems work has been supplemented by a continuing high level of engagement by VADS in the community, particularly in the area of data creator support, through continued involvement with Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) programmes and projects, as well as VADS continuing contribution to the successful AHDS workshops series.
VADS support for data-creators has further benefited this year through the continuing successful development of the JISC funded 'National Fine Art Education Digital Collection Feasibility Study'. The 'Fine Art' project directly managed the creation of a highly significant multimedia collection, consisting of 'works associated with and held within Higher Education Institutions, which represent the value and influence of the artist practitioner in Fine Art Education'. The collection was successfully launched in June 2003 via an innovative open architecture website www.fineart.ac.uk.
Finally, VADS has also developed its links within the JISC Information Environment, (IE) via Artifact, the RDN hub for The Creative Arts and Industries and contributed to IE development projects to enhance both quantitative and qualitative access to digital image resources. In all, the year highlights the continuing development of VADS during a period of organisational change.

i) Collections Development

" VADS has retained collections focus on high quality image collections from within HE, with a future rolling program of accessions of VADS-supported collections, secured for beyond 2002-3, which will include the first AHRB funded projects in VADS area to complete and offer for deposit.

" 3 new collections in total delivered and promoted for reuse on-line, including 2 interdisciplinary image collections, providing access to approximately 3000 additional, integrated visual arts image records. VADS image-catalogue now contains approximately 20, 000 records.

" 2 collections on-line funded from other (institutional) academic sources
" 1 collection on-line from other UK (HLF) funded sources, (led within HE)

Subject Name Number
Archaeology
Ancient History
Classics
English Language and Literature
Medieval and Modern History
Modern Languages
Linguistics
Music
Drama and Theatre
Dance
TV, Film and Video
Philosophy
Religious Studies and Theology
Law
Art & Design 3
History of Art 3
Architecture 1
Media

ii) Collections Management and Preservation

VADS has prepared 2 image collections for delivery/preservation by mapping item level metadata into VADS' Visual Resource Association Core 3.0 based metadata-structure, maintaining copies of archival quality images, and also preparing additional preservation copies of 2 image collections.

" 3 collections prepared for use/preservation, including approximately 3000 item level image records

" 3 collection level metadata records prepared plus online documentation in HTML and standards-enhanced metadata records of approximately 3000 digital images.

iii) Resource Discovery and access

VADS launched new combined resource discovery, delivery, and access systems, for its image collections, developed under the PICTIVA project. The new systems provide enhanced access and retrieval tools for VADS image collections. Following community preferences, discreet digital objects are available directly on-line via user friendly systems. VADS systems now provide for registered access; personalised image-set creation, annotation and dissemination; and visual searching of its fully cross-searchable image collections.
270,702 visitor sessions were recorded to the website over the year. Visitor sessions per month are indicated in the table below, followed by the visual arts RAE rating (3 and above) for the 20 most active HEIs on the VADS site.

Most Active UK Higher Education
Organizations RAE Hits % of Total Hits Visitor Sessions
1 http://surrart.ac.uk 3a 131,332 15.81% 1,055
2 http://linst.ac.uk 5 47,133 5.67% 687
3 http://smuc.ac.uk - 6,712 0.80% 610
4 http://open.ac.uk 5 7,597 0.91% 445
5 http://bris.ac.uk 3a 16,774 2.01% 407
6 http://ed.ac.uk 4 10,965 1.32% 360
7 http://mmu.ac.uk 4 37,027 4.45% 355
8 http://bton.ac.uk 5 20,675 2.48% 338
9 http://ox.ac.uk 4 16,052 1.93% 316
10 http://leeds.ac.uk 3a 11,701 1.40% 303
11 http://uce.ac.uk 4 3,120 0.37% 278
12 http://york.ac.uk - 4,937 0.59% 231
13 http://cam.ac.uk 5 11,592 1.39% 227
14 http://lut.ac.uk - 7,760 0.93% 210
15 http://dundee.ac.uk 4 12,518 1.50% 203
16 http://lgu.ac.uk 3b 17,498 2.10% 191
17 http://gla.ac.uk 5 5,924 0.71% 186
18 http://soton.ac.uk 4 6,285 0.75% 181
19 http://kcl.ac.uk - 11,408 1.37% 168
20 http://nottingham.ac.uk 4 2,785 0.33% 167
Subtotal For HEIs Above 389,795 46.93% 6,918
Total For the Log File 830,570 100% 16,192

iv) Resource Delivery

Delivery of collections is provided directly on-line and has benefited from the combined discovery, delivery and access system enhancements indicated above. Delivery systems for image collections now include user registration. Subsequently, mechanisms have been developed to provide more detailed user and search behaviour analysis. A sample of image collection user-statistics for the available period is given below:

2586 registered users of image collections in period March 2003 - July 2003

Percentage 3a and above RAE rating for VADS HE registered image collection users:

'Role' indicated by registered image collection users:

Percentage HE/FE registered image collection users:

UK/Non-UK Percentage of registered image collection users:

v) Advice and Guidance

VADS has undertaken advice and guidance through workshops, outreach-support, and enquiry answering, in particularly to AHRB applicants/grant holders and the visual arts projects under the JISC Image Cluster program. VADS advice and guidance covers all issues of digital resource creation and management, with particular emphasis on subject-specific rights management, metadata creation and on-line delivery issues.

NB: Enquiry figures only available for period Feb 03 - July 03:

74 queries/requests for help - 36 (49%) related to creating/depositing and 38 (51%) to use of collections, 18 (24%) were by telephone and 56 (76%) by email

Of creating/depositing enquiries:
" 75% were AHRB applicants/grant holders
" 25% Other.

AHRB technical assessments:

Fellowships in Creative and Performing Arts = 9
Innovations = 5
Research Grants Nov 2002 = 18
Resource Enhancement Nov 2002 = 8
Research Grants May 2003 = 6
Resource Enhancement May 2003 = 25

Total = 71

vi) Promotion and Publicity

VADS promotional and publicity activities continued to make significant progress this year, including international outreach. Additional collection leaflet inserts were created for VADS 'information pack'. The pack has been distributed to 13 key conferences and institutions and organisations. All new collections at VADS enjoyed targeted email / press releases. Successful launch events were held for VADS new PICTIVA project delivery systems and the Fine Art project, with accompanying press releases.

Papers presented / published:
Aug 02 ARLIS - 'Fishing for Images' workshop
Sep 02 LTSNs - Shared Visions - 'Learning with Pixels' paper
Nov 02 CHArt - Fine Art project paper
Nov 02 The Surrey Institute Library, User workshop
Dec 02 JISC Content Event - demo stand
Feb 03 Metadata Paper to National Forum for information and Planning - British Library
Mar 03 Museums on the web, poster sessions and presentations
Jul 03 ADC-LTSN Art & Design History Seminar

vii) Strategic Relationships

VADS acts collaboratively to maximise the value of the services it offers and also to build bridges and partnerships to benefit the academic visual arts communities.

The most significant strategic relationship developed this year, has been with 'Artifact' - The RDN Hub for the Creative Arts and Industries. VADS has established relations with the developing Artifact service, through collaboration on the RDN/LTSN portal project, securing agreement on the sharing of ADAM Internet Resource records through Artifact and representation on Advisory Committees. Each service delivers to common subject communities and seeks to maximise value to those communities through mutual collaboration.

VADS continues to pro-actively implement its already established strategic relations with other relevant services within and without the academic sector, particularly those within the auspices of JISC IE, such as the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS) and the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI). VADS relations with the Visual Resources Association, (international standard body for works of visual culture) and Axis, the Arts Councils funded, National Contemporary Artists Database now part of Visual Associations) have also been extended as well as continued involvement with CHArt (Computers and the History of Art Society) and knowledge exchange and awareness raising visits with The Getty Research Institute. Liaisons with the teaching and learning communities is reinforced through continued excellent links with the ADC-LTSN. VADS is represented on the centre's Art & Design reference group and the centre has membership of VADS Advisory Committee. Operational collaboration via ADC-LTSN is foremost in the area of awareness and profile-raising.

viii) Projects (Research and Development)

PICTIVA: 'Promoting the use of On-line Image Collections in Learning and Teaching In the Visual Arts', March 2000 - July 2003, (with The Institute for Image Data Research, University of Northumbria), funded to enhance JISC Activities for Learning and Teaching.
The project has through this year, launched new on-line interfaces and back-end systems to assist access to and the repurposing of VADS image collections for learning, teaching and research. It has also developed infrastructures for producing and publishing Learning Resources and scholarly materials and collating image use information. The initial project outputs have also been evaluated.

The outcomes of the project informs VADS services overall regarding user needs; and the generic tools produced increase functionality to VADS delivery systems. Tools for both data management and user-needs have been developed. The former will permit VADS to readily expand contextual content to the digital items it holds, e.g. presenting scholarly analysis of works of visual art. The latter enables users to trial new search methodologies, (content-based image retrieval), and benefit from the on-line selection, annotation and distribution of items prior to use, via 'self-managed' image-sets.

National Fine Art Education Digital Collection Feasibility Study,
(October 2001-July 2003)

VADS was successful in securing JISC funding for this project in August 2002, in partnership with Alan Brickwood Associates, Project Director. The project has produced a pilot digital collection of work associated with and held within Higher Education Institutions which represent the value and influence of the artist practitioner in Fine Art Education. The project has enjoyed significant community support following a successful survey of the discipline and establishment of a high profile 'hanging committee'. In the first instance the pilot resource delivers around 200 digital images and associated metadata on-line, from work selected from 10 Higher Education Institutions, along with the full digitisation of the Council of National Art Awards Trust Art Collection, which includes work by many extremely important figures in British Art such as Henry Moore, Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton.

The project significantly contributes to VADS profile in the Fine Art domain and has developed expertise and tools for high quality, standards-compliant, data-creation management, that is extensible to VADS core work. The project's success in its initial phase led to extended funding from JISC to July 2003 and the last phase of the pilot project has seen the development of an innovative open-architecture multimedia website which was successfully launched at the British Academy in June 2003. Applications for 'beyond pilot' funding have been made to further develop collection content, context and protocols.

AHDS Hybrid Archives Project, (JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources programme, from Sept 02)

VADS contributed to this successful proposal to produce and test a model for 'partial deposit' of institutional resources with services such as the AHDS. The model will take elements of both traditional deposit methodology and harvesting methodology and re-work them to produce an integrated and cohesive deposit model that ensures:
Institutional assets are disclosed to the AHDS at a level of granularity that enables detailed cross-searching with AHDS full deposit collections, and that they are exposed for searching within the appropriate Portals of the JISC information environment.
Long-term preservation of institutional assets is provided for; together with a formal exit strategy should the institution no longer be able or willing to support the collection.

VADS will work with two nominated collections to test the models developed for this project which will begin upon recruitment of new project staff, from October 2003.

JISC Image Portal Demonstrator

VADS is a contributing partner to this 'proof of concept', format-focused portal project, led by the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) and Systems Simulation Ltd (SSL), which aims to 'join up' digital image content from all subject areas in the JISC Information Environment (IE) through a single access point. The project will increase access to VADS image collections across the JISC IE.

JISC Usability Study

VADS has been a contributing partner to this project led by the Centre for HCI Design, City University, which undertook an extensive usability and accessibility analysis of the new VADS interfaces developed through PICTIVA. The report from the project provides in-depth usability analysis of VADS on-line systems and will be beneficial to future development work of on-line systems.

Appendix 1 Collections list:

Collections in Service** / accession* / negotiation 03-04 Funder
Public Monuments and Sculptures Association**, The Courtauld Institute HLF
Cordwainer Collection**, London College of Fashion LCF
2002 Degree Shows, Glasgow School of Art** GSA
Digitisation In Art & Design - 10 years of Design journal, London College of Printing JISC e-lib
Design Council Slide Collection*, Manchester Metropolitan University RSLP
Designing Britain*, University of Brighton JISC 5/99
Direct Digital Capture of Stained Glass, Image Colour Institute, University of Derby AHRB
Corpus Vitrearum, The Courtauld Institute AHRB
Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture, The Courtauld Institute AHRB
Craft Study Centre Collection, The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College JISC 5/99
Textiles Collection, The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College JISC 5/99
African and Asian Visual Arts Archive Digital Folders, UEL AHRB
ArtWorld, Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, University of East Anglia JISC 5/99
SALIDDA, The Commonwealth Institute NoF
National Fine Art Education Digital Collection JISC
Tim Mara Collection Tim Mara Estate
Fine Art Student Collection, The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College JISC
Latin American Artists Archive, University of Essex AHRB
Constance Howard Collection, Goldsmiths AHRB
Posters of Conflict, Manchester Metropolitan University AHRB
Funeral Monuments, University of Sussex AHRB
Book Design Collection, Manchester Metropolitan University Library MMU
Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories etc, Birkbeck College AHRB
Centre for Study of Surrealism and its Legacies, University of Essex AHRB
Centre for Study of Domestic Interiors, RCA, Visualising Interior Design Database AHRB
Russian Art, University of Sheffield AHRB
Ruskin Teaching Collection, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford AHRB

AHDS Visual Arts is part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Copyright 2003.