2RO038 - First Archive
by Laura B. Greig
In 2014, my parents asked me to archive their art collection so they could give a rough estimate to an insurance agency. The first twenty works weren’t a problem — I just needed a photo of the artwork and scan of the receipt. Once I started on the works that didn’t have receipts, things got more complicated. I created a spreadsheet, then had to start it over when I realized I hadn’t been recording important information, like dimensions. Then I started recording everything — signature, certificate of authenticity, place of purchase, medium, and soon got frustrated. The more categories I added, the emptier the spreadsheet looked. That last category, medium, is particularly complicated. Sometimes it’s “photograph,” sometimes it’s “giclee cyanotype,” and those won’t be listed next to each other if sorted in that order. So many connections between the works were lost to the spreadsheet. Even getting images into the spreadsheet was extremely difficult; the software is expecting embedded images to be visual aids, not table entries. I was getting overwhelmed with 20 artworks, and my parents have around 200.
The existing software solutions at the time were expensive, and didn’t provide any more functionality than I could code myself. My next step was learning XML and Django. I removed all the images from the spreadsheet, and replaced them with a short text description of each artwork. I moved all the images into a folder on my home server, and tested both renaming the images, and listing the original filename in the spreadsheet. I created a website, served just to my parents, that had a sortable, searchable index of about one quarter of their artwork. Promising start, but it wasn’t particularly useful to them.
The website looked great and worked well though, and made it clear that I needed to take better images of the artwork. I’m a decent photographer, I understand cameras well, but this is where I hit the limits of my capabilities. My parents don’t live near me so I’d only have a few days with them at a time, and the time and labor it took to create, identify, and upload photographs was enormous. All this effort, and the photographs were terrible. There was glare on the glass, skewing, and inaccurate color in almost every piece. This was a problem that required expensive equipment that I didn’t have.
In 2017, I started talking to people about the idea of creating some software of our own. We were already hosting events and curating shows — building a team and community — so we figured American Cyborg was an ideal platform to launch as a business. We filed as an LLC, secured two years of funding from Datum 9 Ventures. In 2018, Ashley Koenen and I became our company’s first full-time employees. Elizabeth Watkins, Kristin Lucas, and Joseph Moore helped us shape this idea into Rookery.